Highlighting journalism on Mastodon

To reinforce and encourage Mastodon as the go-to place for journalism, we’re launching a new feature today. You will notice that underneath some links shared on Mastodon, the author byline can be clicked to open the author’s associated fediverse account, right in the app. This highlights writers and journalists that are active on the fediverse, and makes it easier than ever to follow them and keep up with their future work—potentially across different publications. Writers often work with different publishers over the span of their careers, but Mastodon is the perfect platform to amass a loyal audience that you, as the author, truly own, and can take with you across the fediverse.

Some of the first websites adopting this feature are The Verge, MacStories, and MacRumors. If you have an account on mastodon.social and use the web version or one of our official mobile apps, you will see associated fediverse accounts underneath their articles, no matter who posts them. Of course, it’s also part of Mastodon’s API, so we expect to see support among the vast array of third party apps for Mastodon as well. All Mastodon features are always available to all third-party apps since the API that powers the web version and the official mobile apps is the exact same for everyone.

The technical

We’ve decided to create a new kind of OpenGraph tag—the same kind of tags you have on your website to determine which thumbnail image will appear on the preview for the page when shared on Discord, iMessage, or Mastodon. It looks like this: <meta name="fediverse:creator" content="@Gargron@mastodon.social" />.

The handle can be any fediverse account, not just Mastodon. That includes Flipboard, Threads, WordPress (with the ActivityPub plugin installed), PeerTube, Pixelfed, and many others. It will work with and without the leading at-symbol for the handle. If multiple tags are present on the page, the first one will be displayed, but we may add support for showing multiple authors in the future. We intend to propose a specification draft for other ActivityPub platforms in the coming weeks.

The support for this tag is currently rolled out on mastodon.social and any other server that uses a recent Mastodon nightly release. To enable it for your own Mastodon account, navigate to the Verification tab on the Edit Profile page, and add the website domains from which you want to be credited in the Author Attribution section. E.g. if you’re a journalist for The Verge, you would add theverge.com to the list. This extra step is meant to prevent malicious websites from framing users in link previews.