Two years later.
Want to know one of the major reasons Mastodon didn't catch on with journalists and large website owners?
It is *invisible* in referrer statistics.
Here's my blog from the last month.
BlueSky now sends me more traffic than Bing.
How much traffic does Mastodon send? It is impossible to know due to the "noreferrer" header in all links.
(I'm not saying your privacy isn't important. But you can't grow a community if no-one knows you exist.)
And now, mastodon.social sends referrers!
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/33214
(Don't worry, it is up to your instance to opt in to this. Your Mastodon install is private by default.)
![A couple of changes here, ultimately with the goal of making it easier to control the referrer policy by setting ALLOW_REFERRER_ORIGIN to true in the environment.
The abundance of rel="norefer...](https://files.mastodon.social/cache/preview_cards/images/123/471/057/original/9ddc5ff20ef9cbd7.png "A couple of changes here, ultimately with the goal of making it easier to control the referrer policy by setting ALLOW_REFERRER_ORIGIN to true in the environment.
The abundance of rel="norefer...")
Referer traffic from Mastodon.social has started coming through to my blog!
Full write-up this lunchtime.
@ohai it'd be great if you enabled this when it's released :)
@ohai amazing! TYSM <3
@Edent TIL referer headers are even something you can control. Never even crossed my mind.
@floppy the web is a weird and wonderful place!
@Edent whoever H. T. T. Protocol was, he thought of everything!
@Edent apologies, H. T. T. Protocol-Secure these days, I forgot he changed it to be double-barrelled.
@Edent after marrying into the Secure dynasty of upstate New York.
(no, I have no idea what the fuck I'm talking about either, I'm sorry to be inflicting this bullshit upon you)
@Edent Interesting! I imagine Mastodon’s impact in referral stats is also diluted by being spread across many instance URLs, many of which don’t include the word “mastodon” anywhere.