After Elon Musk bought Twitter, many are looking for alternatives. One of them is the decentralized social network Mastodon. You can even run your own mastodon server, instructions for this can be found here.
After you have registered on a Mastodon server, it is advisable to complete your profile first. You can also specify websites in the profile, for example to link to your blog. Mastodon offers the possibility to verify these linked websites. This tutorial explains how this works.
Enter website
In the profile settings you will find the “Profile metadata” area, where you can enter up to four elements.
For example, I put the link to this blog and to my GitHub profile here.
So simply enter your data here.
Verification
So that others can see in your profile that the linked websites really belong to you, you have to verify them. Once this is done, they will be displayed as verified in your profile.
In the image above, in the “Verification” section, you will find a link that you must place on your website. Since this can usually only be done by someone who also has administrative access to it, you can use it to verify yourself as the owner.
We can’t do much with the link alone, it has to be changed depending on the application. Let’s do it with my data.
<a rel="me" href="https://social.nubecula.org/@blacksheep">Mastodon</a>
Website
To verify your own website, you must enter the following in the head section:
<head>
<link rel="me" href="https://social.nubecula.org/@blacksheep">
</head>
After that, all you have to do is visit the website and update your profile in Mastodon. If it worked, it should look something like this:
GitHub profile
To verify your GitHub profile you simply have to enter the link to your Mastodon profile. It then looks something like this:
Conclusion
As you can see, the verification is quite easy to do. Of course, the whole thing can also be adapted to other applications.