Mastodon enforces a "noreferrer" on all external links.
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@WiteWulf @ianb
But how will you know that it is there to engage with?That's the fundamental question.
I'd never heard of reddit before it popped up in my referrer logs. So I went, created an account, and talked with the people discussing my stuff.
There's no way to do that here.
(And, yes, it is fine if people want to share in private if that's their choice.)
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@Edent they might come here, for example, because they know the things they say won't be taken out of context and turned into a sensationalist article.
I'm old enough to remember hanging out on newsgroups, and IRC, and forums, and livejournal, and I don't remember anyone there worrying that they wouldn't be able to build a community if it wasn't possible for everyone in the world to use the space as their own personal marketing campaign. -
@whimsy hey, quick Q, what happened to newsgroups and IRC?
Are they still thriving? -
Amelia Bellamy-Roydsreplied to Terence Eden last edited by
@Edent It's a bit of an HTML limitation, that there's no way to map referrer URLs to a sanitized or canonical URL, without obfuscating the actual destination to pass it through a link service (like t.co). I guess too much potential for abuse?
Examples: for public posts, I'd want the referrer to be the canonical URL of the post, not the URL of the post as processed on my server.
For private/followers-only posts, I'd want the referrer (if any) to be some anonymized version of the network domain.
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Terence Edenreplied to Amelia Bellamy-Royds last edited by
@AmeliaBR yup!
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@Edent how do the numbers for no referee compare?
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@imikotoba looks like approx 50% but I haven't explored in detail.
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@Edent whole point of decline of referrer header is to improve privacy.
You have no right to know the origin of every link to your content.If the origin wants to interact with your content, you can provide a comment section on your website, webmentions etc. and maybe they will tell you.
If you want to track links to their origin, use unique tracking links; link shorteners, UTM parameters etc.
You will notice that folks unshorten and remove those or outright will refuse to interact with them. -
@Edent Didn’t even know Masto does this. It seems counter-productive for a very dubious privacy gain.
That might as well explain a significant portion of news orgs missing completely. -
@Edent while I think you have no bad intentions, I'm not buying publishers claiming they need this kind of tracking:
Domain or even full path for each incoming click.
Unique returning user and click paths on the website.One can create content without tailoring it to every niche community that is consuming it on their own terms.
One can even create content without being let in on every conversation about it.I highly doubt one truly needs to tailor to every single Mastodon / Fediverse server.
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Damage Control Blogreplied to Terence Eden last edited by
@Edent This explains why we never see any traffic from Mastodon, despite people retooting and giving us favorites. It certainly gives us the impression people share links without reading our articles, unless they discuss it here.
We get privacy concerns, but this gives the impression of links going out into the void. It's not true, but we'll likely never know how many people here read our work. Ah well.
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@[email protected] @[email protected] I'd like to provide some context. For what it's worth NodeBB does this too.
The reason why is that spammers will often post links for backlinking and SEO purposes. Enforcing the noreferrer stops the benefit from propagating.
Your post brings up an interesting side effect, however... that crucial analytics from real traffic is lost.
Perhaps we can come up with a better solution... users with good reputation would have their links posted without those attributes.
Do you think that'd help?
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@Edent I don't think monetization discussions are helping Mastodon. Once there is money, there is interests, once there are interests, there are problems. I pay for my Mastodon instance. Its fine.
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@julian @damagecontrolblog @thisismissem do you mean rel=nofollow https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/qualify-outbound-links?#nofollow ?
This is separate from noreferrer, but can be combined. -
@julian @thisismissem Considering the flood of SEO spam, that reasoning makes sense.
If a solution like users with good reputations being able to have links posted without the nofollow attribute is possible we'd be onboard.
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@Edent Is there anything on the mastodon GitHub proposing this as a behavior change?
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@Edent a german news station said they get more traffic from mastodon than from twitter. So how do they masure that?
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Referrer has been abused by megasites to invade user privacy. So that toy had to be taken away. Sorry. Perhaps you could put "?from=ActivityPub" in the URLs you post onto the fediverse?
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@spdrnl could you point out where I mentioned monetisation?
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@knizer I don't know. Go find out and report back!
