In under 24 hours, my latest video is already approaching 500 views.
So where are all the external viewers coming from?
— The platform of awesome of course!
@randahl Did m.s start showing up after referrals were preserved?
@richlv refferrals were preserved? I am not sure what you mean. Would you please elaborate?
@randahl Mastodon used to instruct browsers not to send the "Referer" header.
This was recently changed on mastodon.social, so it will be more visible to websites that users were lead to them from Mastodon (other instances to follow later, I assume).
So I was wondering whether mastodon.social showing up was related to that change, or whether it was tracked in some other way before as well.
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/12/mastodon-now-sends-referer-headers-hurrah/
https://anderegg.ca/2024/12/26/update-on-mastodon-referers
@richlv that is interesting.
Well, for as long as I can remember, I believe I have seen the Mastodon referrer entries in the YouTube stats. That does not appear like a recent change to me.
However, a real problem for Mastodon is, because it is federated, the statistics show 10+ different Mastodon clients rather than one entry that summarises all the traffic from Mastodon. This information would be really beneficial, and I hope YouTube will implement a procedure for generating this overview.
@randahl Given that there are many instances, some for personal usage, it might be impossible to group them all.
Unless Mastodon enables a generic referrer which then propagates (and is enabled) on all instances :)
Although it's interesting how Youtube could have figured out people arrived from Mastodon, if referrer was not set.
@richlv @randahl oh, I was referring to the question how to group all instances into one group Mastodon (or Fediverse) in analytics to have more useful insight into these statistics.
You can automatically recognise if a server is running an instance or not with a simple http request. So the analytical service can simply ask for each domain if it's in Fediverse or not and group the source domains.