I’ve been a Mastodon user for many years now, though — as is commonly the case for me with respect to social media — I’ve deleted and created new accounts there many times over. One of the cool things about Mastodon, though, is the verification system. Rather than having you pay money, submit a form, or any other nonsense, Mastodon has users verify themselves via proving ownership of their website. While that’s obviously a problem for anyone who lacks a site, it means anyone with a site can easily verify themselves through it.
The key is to just include a link to your Mastodon profile with a rel="me" attribute:
Put a link to your Mastodon profile on your website or webpage. The important part is that the link has to have a
https://joinmastodon.org/verificationrel="me"attribute on it. Then edit your Mastodon profile and put the address of your website or web page in one of your four profile fields. Save your profile, that’s it!
This is super simple when creating a site by hand, as I’ve done on my link page. I wasn’t sure how I could achieve the same thing with WordPress, though, so that my link on the About page would be verified.
My initial thought was that this isn’t something I could do without a plugin because my web searches on it didn’t turn up anything. In reality, it’s probably so obvious to people who know their way around WordPress that no one bothered to write about it. Here’s to hoping this post will help someone else who is as clueless as I was.
In my case, I was using a button. I just had to go to the Block settings for the button and then expand the Advanced options. There’s literally a field for “Link Rel” that does exactly what I needed.
After adding this, my the site verifies without any issues!
