I find general source tracking perfectly acceptable. It does not identify me as a user to any of both parties only tells the target site that users originate from another site.

I find personalized urls or tracking parameters bad. General source channel tracking is harmless for me.

Referral tracking with the URL is fine IMO, it’s useful for someone running a site to see what other sites they are getting traffic from, and it doesn’t really affect my privacy.

I have noticed the RSS feed thing, I assume they want to get site traffic and are preventing people from reading with a feed reader or something?

Hmm, I’m subscribed to their RSS feed and I get full articles out of each post 🤷 I use Feeder in case that’s helpful for context.

im subbed with freshrss and for the first few weeks, it was a full article each Friday.

now, it’s just like you’ve posted.

i may have been late to that site but i do feel like i saw the seeds of enshittification sprout right before my eyes

Doesn’t ublock strip away the referrer?

To me, that’s generic and not invasive.

Selfh.st “just” started. Maybe he didn’t get around setting it up. Did you ask?

This is such a Lemmy/self hosted problem lol

I just pulled the feed for the first time after reading your post, and the content is like you describe. A pity as I liked what I saw on the website.

I may try the workaround and see if it helps.

The ?ref doesn’t bother me at all. Most of the target sites don’t even recognize it and if they do, I’m not sure what they’d do with it. Most of the links are to Github anyway and what is that going to mean to them?

I remember he mentions the ?ref in a blog post a while ago but I can’t remember what it was there for.

The RSS is a disappointment. I’ve been following that site since day one. I use NetNewsWire for my app. There is a web view toggle that shows maybe 70% of the content correctly. The updates and new software don’t render correctly.

It use to work fine, I want to say this is something to do with the ghost platform. It drives you to the web site. I’d be more inclined to just go to the website every Friday rather than have a broken rss.

My RSS reader, Akregator, has an option to open every article in an embedded web browser. I use this feature precisely for these kinds of situations. Most artists that I follow have their own websites with proper RSS feeds, but others only post on Bluesky or similar, that also only show the title and body text. If I can’t follow them through RSS, I just don’t follow them at all. I can’t be bothered to have their newsletter clog up my inbox or use some third-party service that will probably shut down when I least expect it to.

I see plenty of content in the RSS feed. I think you just checked it at a bad time; sometimes the site has problems.

The email tracking is even worse. I really hate the obfuscated links with who knows what embedded tracking. At least the ?ref is clear. It’s brought me close to unsubscribing

The ?ref tag is from the Ghost blogging platform. https://forum.ghost.org/t/remove-ref-from-links-in-posts/37701/2

This is called “Outbound link tagging” - you can configure this on the Analytics Settings page (/ghost/#/settings/analytics)

And yeah, they do the same as GamingOnLinux with not including the content in the RSS feeds.

Forgot to give my opinion. The ref tag doesn’t bother me because it’s not giving any private information up, besides where I am from just like the referrer header does. I am kind of conflicted with the RSS feeds because I personally use them for many things, however I understand that these places need to advertise to make money (though I block ads too).

nay

rude