Make your website or blog fediverse-ready | Stefan Bohacek's Personal Website and Blog

Make your website or blog fediverse-ready – Stefan Bohacek's Personal Website and Blog

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4 days ago, updated a day ago

Make your website or blog fediverse-ready

Verification checker

Learn to make a website

In the fediverse, there is no central authority that can verify you. Instead, you link to your fediverse profile from your website, blog, or even some of the larger platforms, like GitHub, in a way that proves that these online identities are connected and controlled by you.

This then serves as one of several signals about the authenticity and authority of your fediverse account.

And you can also automatically include an author link when people share your site or an article. I’ll walk you through how to set this all up.

Verify your account with a website or a blog

This works on Mastodon, Friendica, and some other platforms. For the purpose of this tutorial I will use my Mastodon account.

To verify that a website or a blog is associated with your fediverse account, you will need to add a link from your website to your account, with a bit of extra code.

One option is to add a visible link to your fediverse profile with a rel="me" attribute, like below. The text of the link can be anything, just make sure to include the link to your profile, not your username.

Follow me in the fediverse!

Or you can use a tag inside the tag, which will not be shown on your site. It will look like the example below. Same rules: a rel="me" attribute, and href with the full URL of your profile page.

Then back on Mastodon, edit your profile and add your website link, or links, as you can have up to four of them on most Mastodon servers, using custom fields.

After saving the updates, the links on your profile will be highlighted as verified.

On an older version of Mastodon, this might look like this.

Include author link in posts

With the release of its version 4.3, Mastodon introduced a way to showcase your fediverse profile when you or someone else posts a link to your website or a blog article. For this to work, you need to do two things.

First, add this tag inside the tag on your website. Unlike with the verification link, here you do want to use your full username, including your server, not the link to your profile page.

Then, on Mastodon, go to Preferences > Public Profile > Verification and in the Author Attribution section, list all of your websites and blogs in the Websites allowed to credit you field.

Save the changes, and next time you or someone else posts a link to a website on this list, a link to your fediverse profile will be shown below the preview card.

Note that this only applies to links shared after you added the websites. Preview cards can be cached for up to two weeks, so links posted before you made the update may not show the profile link, but will once the cached information gets refreshed.

Here’s a little tool that you can use to check if your verification tags were set up correctly.

Fediverse profile URL

Full link to your profile page, e.g. https://example.social/@user

Fediverse handle

Your full fediverse username and server, such as @user@example.social

Your website

Your website, blog, or a compatible social media profile page

Check verification<br>Clear results

If your verified links are not appearing:

If your site uses a caching plugin or CDN, clear it.

Make sure that the link to your fediverse profile on your website contains the rel="me" attribute, and it is the full link, not your username.

The fediverse:creator meta tag should be inside the element, and use your full username as the value.

Links shared before you verified your website may be cached up to two weeks, try sharing a link you haven&rsquo;t shared previously. (Either publish a new blog post, or find an older one that has not been shared in some time.)

Hope you find this walkthrough useful! Feel free to reach out if you run into any problems, otherwise, until next time!

#fediverse #make-a-website #personal-websites #social-media #verification

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Stefan Bohacek

Enjoying my work? Here's how you can pay me back. And follow me on Mastodon!

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