An update on Mastodon and referer headers

December 26, 2024

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. I knew this wasn’t the case, but that lack of traffic data certainly wasn’t doing Mastodon any favours in terms of marketing.

Yesterday I saw this Mastodon post from Terence Eden. I haven’t been keeping tabs on social media and RSS sources as much over the last few weeks, so I missed his original blog post about this. Turns out, Mastoson servers now have an option to enable referer headers! This is enabled for everyone using Mastodon.social, as Terence and I both am. I think this is a great option, and I hope it’s something that other large servers enable. I don’t think it’ll affect things dramatically, but I appreciate anything that helps spread the word about Mastodon.