Wrote a script to trawl my Apache logs to figure out how many people subscribe to my website via feeds. Findings: 1. I have 2X as many RSS subscribers as email newsletter subscribers. 2. Mailchimp's RSS-to-email reader reports subscribers properly in its fetches.
1
1
3. Indieweb readers don't seem to announce the number of subscribers in HTTP GET calls, unlike other readers. 4. Feedly seems to have an order of magnitude more users than any other reader (or for some reason my readers are all clustered there).
1
4
Also keep in mind that subscriber stats reported via user agent are 100% not a reliable source of info, I could make it look like Aperture has a million readers of your blog if you want
1
1
Totally, for sure. And maybe if I was a nefarious feed reader startup founder I might do something like that!
1
Replying to @benwerd
Frankly that's the reason I never added it to Aperture and never recommended anyone else do either. It's a naive practice left over from a much more trusting era before people were thinking with a security mindset.

Jan 17, 2021 · 5:21 AM UTC

1
1
Replying to @aaronpk
100% makes sense. I wonder how we could report those kinds of stats in a more secure way? Although I’m inclined to think there probably can’t be a verifiable way to do it and maintain privacy, so maybe we should care less about these sorts of stats anyway 🤷‍♂️
1
1
Yep, plus subscriber/follower count has definitely been the source of a lot of the terrible stuff on social media so I'm not sure it's even a good metric to try to recreate outside of a centralized system
1