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If you run a large Mastodon instance, and have upgraded to 4.4, please turn on referer headers.
It is *so* important for the health of the Fediverse.
At the moment I have 4x the followers on Mastodon as I do on BlueSky - but my blog's stats don't show that. In fact, they show the opposite!
Yes, it is privacy preserving. Yes, it makes a difference to publishers. Yes, it will show how vibrant an ecosystem we have.
Referer traffic from Mastodon.social has started coming through to my blog!
Full write-up this lunchtime.
And now, mastodon.social sends referrers!
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="noreferrer" ...
GitHub (github.com)
(Don't worry, it is up to your instance to opt in to this. Your Mastodon install is private by default.)
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.)
Mastodon enforces a "noreferrer" on all external links.
I have mixed feelings about that.
As a blogger, I want to see *where* visitors are coming from. I also like to see (and sometimes join in) with the conversations they're having.
But, I get that people want privacy and don't want to "leak" where they're visiting from.
Is it such a bad thing to tell a website "I was referred from this specific server"?