Are you part of the twitter migration? Me too! I chose Mastodon as my social app of choice, and ruby.social as my community.

Learning Mastodon takes time, and I am right there with you. There is one thing that I can be assistance with, helping you figure out how to verify your website link in your profile. I am on WordPress, because it is a cool content management system, allows me as a non-frontend dev to have something that looks halfway decent with a minimal amount of work, and well I believe in dogfooding.

Head on over to your Mastodon profile, and click edit profile

Author’s picture with the option to click “Edit profile”

In your Mastodon Profile metadata section, add in your personal website, then Save changes. Notice the Verification section off to the right of the metadata options? Copy your customized verification link.

You can verify yourself as the owner of the links in your profile metadata. For that, the linked website must contain a link back to your Mastodon profile. The link back must have a rel="me" attribute. The text content of the link does not matter.

Mastodon settings/profile

Mastodon Verification section

Next head to your website and add the link on your site anywhere. For example in a footer/header section where you might have other social links. For my WordPress site, I added a Custom HTML block in my sidebar widget section with my Mastodon profile link.

Screengrab of my default Sidebar section, with the Custom HTML block

To check that everything is correct for verification, check out your page source. As with many things front end, checking on the raw HTML (for us the div tag) is the best way to see what the link actually is using in its metadata. The important part for Mastodon verification is the rel="me" attribute. When I look at my page source, I see that it is there

Page source of christine-seeman.com view in Chrome Developer Tools

That’s it! It might take a bit for your verification to show up on your profile (caching/propagation take time) but you should see that sweet green highlighting eventually to let everyone know that you really do control access to that link.