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.

shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/12/masto…
anderegg.ca/2024/12/26/update-…

An update on Mastodon and referer headers

Earlier this year, I looked into why Mastodon didn’t include referer headers. As someone who enjoys following web analytics, it seemed a shame that Mastodon appeared never to send any traffic.

^{Gavin Anderegg}

@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.

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 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.

@knezi Got it, thanks. That might indeed be a good way to group them, if only a bit more resource intensive (and not feasible from a simple Apache log report, for example).

Still, not sure how could Mastodon servers show up in stats when/if referrer is not passed.