Mastodon enforces a "noreferrer" on all external links.

Terence Eden

imikotoba

@Edent how do the numbers for no referee compare?

Terence Eden

@imikotoba looks like approx 50% but I haven't explored in detail.

robot 9001

@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.

Rihards Olups

@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.

robot 9001

@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.

Damage Control Blog

@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.

julian

@[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?

cc @[email protected]

spdrnl

@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.

robot 9001

@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.

Damage Control Blog

@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.

knizer

@Edent Is there anything on the mastodon GitHub proposing this as a behavior change?

gunstick

@Edent a german news station said they get more traffic from mastodon than from twitter. So how do they masure that?

Log 🪵

@Edent

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?

Terence Eden

@spdrnl could you point out where I mentioned monetisation?

Terence Eden

@knizer I don't know. Go find out and report back!

Terence Eden

@gunstick because they put tracking links on the things they share from their official account. They cannot see what random people post.

Godfrey642

@Edent @tanavit
I agree.
One of the things i find hard about Mastodon is finding and keeping a track on ppl in interested in.

Following doesn't necessarily mean you get their posts popping up in your feed. Which is a shame bc Im missing out on a lot of interesting info and links.

datum (n=1)

@log @Edent I came here to say 1) this, and

2) in your image the no-referrer count doesn't even show. If volume is below 1% - well I guess this is a bad argument: if fedi WERE a significant source then it MIGHT be showing as no-referrer in your top 10, so - 1) still though, as log says!

Leonardo Ferreira Fontenelle

@Edent @eltonfc There's some discussion here:

Change Referer value to something generic such as "urn:activitypub:mastodon" or similar · Issue #21795 · mastodon/mastodon

Pitch Currently, Mastodon does not appear in webstats anywhere, as it asks browsers to omit any referer value. This is a privacy measure to ensure that individual user accounts and small servers are not identified to webstats. As such it...

GitHub (github.com)