Verifying your Mastodon Account

Ali Murteza Yesil — Wed, 01 Feb 2023 07:38:00 +0000

Account verification is a very simple process that you can do yourself. Also it is a very important for proving that you own that Mastodon account. It baffles me that even tech literate people don't do it.

How verification works?

If 2 entities are claiming that they own each other and if their claims match, we understand that both of these are owned by the same person.

Example: If car with plate number "ABC 123" has a sign reading "I also own a house (10 Downing Street, London)" behind its back windshield and if the house at 10 Downing Street, London has a sign reading "I also own a car (ABC 123)" behind the window next to door, you know that the person who has key for the car and the person who has key for the house is the same person.

Verification on Mastodon works the same way. Your Mastodon account should claim that you also own a website and your website should claim that you also own a Mastodon account. To make such claims in the internet, we add rel="me" attribute to an HTML tag with href="URL" attribute, turning that tag into a claim.

2 ways to add claim to your website

Visible button: If you want claim to be a button that leads people to your Mastodon profile, use an "a" anchor inside <body> section

<a rel="me" href="https://fosstodon.org/@murtezayesil">Mastodon</a>

Invisible claim: If you want to make the claim but don't want to add a button, you can use link tag inside <head> section

<link rel="me" href="https://fosstodon.org/@murtezayesil">

If you also added your website's URL to your Mastodon account's profile metadata, server will attempt to read your website HTML and check if the claim is true.

Note: If you are using a CMS such as WordPress or DEV.to, you may need to find a way to insert custom HTML to head or body of your profile page. It may be even impossible depending on your hosting platform. Static Site Generators such as Jekyll, Hugo, Pelican and Publii are easier to work with since they allow adding custom HTML and even altering the theme.

Originally posted on Murteza Yesil's blog.

DEV Community: Ali Murteza Yesil

Verifying your Mastodon Account

How verification works?

2 ways to add claim to your website