How to Verify with Mastodon

How to verify with Mastodon.

This page documents a process maintained by Mastodon. For verification failures, please reach out to the Mastodon team directly on the Mastodon project’s GitHub.

For issues with this doc page itself, please reach out to us on Hachyderm’s Community Issue tracker.

What is verification?

Verification on Mastodon works less like Twitter and more like an identity service. That is, you do not need to prove your association with your own brand to an entity or to pay a fee, you are only showing that you are the owner of one (or more) domains or accounts on separate services to substantiate your digital identity.

Here’s what it looks like when a profile has verified via their GitHub identity:

Screenshot of profile for user quintessence, showing avatar, header
and relevantly the verified GitHub URL field which is highlighted in
green and has a green checkmark next to the URL.

GitHub shows as verified with a green checkmark and complete URL, including username / handle.

What domains or accounts can you verify?

You can verify via:

  • Any domain that you can edit pages for
  • Any online service that recognizes, supplies, or allows you to supply the “rel me” attribute (see below).

How to verify

Verifying with domains

In general, when you verify you will do so by using the following HTML on the page you are editing, like a personal site or blog:

<a rel="me" href="https://hachyderm.io/@username">Hachyderm</a>

If you would like to avoid using a visible link, like the above, you can also put the following in the page headers:

<link rel="me" href="https://hachyderm.io/@username">

After doing either of the above, you will need to add the URL of the site to your Hachyderm / Mastodon profile. You will do that by:

  1. Go to Edit Profile
  2. In one of the four fields of Profile Metadata, add the URL of the destination you are verifying
  3. Save changes

Here is an example profile with two separate sources of identity verification:

Screenshot of profile for user Matty Stratton, used with permission,
showing two sources of URL verification. One is his own website,
mattstratton.com and the other is his Keyoxide account. Both are
highlighted in green with green checkmarks next to the URL to show
they are verified.

Screenshot of Hachyderm user profile taken with permission.

Verifying with services

We will add more services as requested by the Community either by creating an issue on our Community Issue Tracker or via a direct pull request on the Community repo.

Instructions for current, commonly requested, services are below.

As with the verification process itself: when verifying with a service, that service is responsible for assisting with errors or issues with verification. If you experience issues with the verification process, please reach out to the relevant service for assistance.

GitHub

In early 2023 GitHub announced support for multiple social URLs, including adding support for Mastodon specifically. In order to verify via GitHub:

  1. Go to your GitHub profile page and click “Edit”
  2. Provide your Hachyderm account URL of the format https://hachyderm.io/@USERNAME
  3. Click “Save”

Once you have saved, your GitHub profile should now render your Mastodon account in the format @USERNAME@hachyderm.io.

Visually

When you edit, it will look like this:

Screenshot of editable fields on Quintessence's GitHub
profile. Specifically under social fields the full URL for
her Hachyderm account, of the pattern https://hachyderm.io/@USERNAME, is
supplied.

Once saved, your Hachyderm account will look like this:

Screenshot of only the rendered Mastodon handle after
saving the change, of the format @username@hachyderm.io