Mastodon rel=me help

[maique]

Gone through all the posts mentioning this, tried the JavaScript solutions on those posts, and nothing works so far.
I have a custom domain for my Write.as blog, and would love to get that verified on Mastodon. Something that’s really easy to do if you have access to the html for the theme, but seems impossible over at Write.as.

Can someone provide a little assistance ? Since Write.as is running it’s own instance, I believe that some love could be shown for this feature. It would be much easier if we had this on the blog settings: a field where we could insert our mastodon username, and that would be included in the html for the blog. We wouldn’t even need to know what was happening in the background, it would be automatic.

Thanks.

[kevquirk]

Easiest way to do this would be to have an about or contact page, and include the link.

<a rel="me" href="<mastodon profile link>Find me on Mastodon</a>

If you don’t want to show the link on your page. For example, you want to be verified on mastodon, but don’t want visitors to see the link on your Write.as page, use this:

 <a class="masto-link" rel="me" href="[mastodon profile link]">Find me on Mastodon</a>

Then add the following CSS in your customiser:

a.masto-link { display:none; }

[maique]

Hi. Thank you so much for the reply.
I do have a contact page and inserted the link, and css.
It works, the link is being served and hidden.

However, when inspecting the source of the page, I can see the link there, but the rel tag has been stripped and added a nofollow.

So, in the end, the rel part doesn’t work

[cjeller1592]

That’s a great idea to automate it in some way @maique! Currently you’re correct — there’s no way to do this at the moment because Write.as adds rel=nofollow to links by default. @matt outlines the reasons in this forum post:

Write.as adds nofollow (rel=nofollow) to all links in posts by Pro accounts

This is added in Write.as / WF to prevent instances from having their search rankings ruined by spammers. A common thing spammers will do is utilize a domain with high search authority to link back to their low-quality domains and boost their rankings. Adding nofollow prevents that, letting Google et al. know that they shouldn’t consider the WF instance linking to their sites as an endorsement. There would still be some potential for abuse on Write.as since we’re relatively inexpensive, but I’…

However, in that same post he mentions that removing the rel=nofollow could be a possibility for those with a Pro subscription. I think that’s more than fair.

I’m curious to see what other people thing of that idea. For one, having rel=me would open the door for Write.as to be one step closer to implementing some IndieWeb standards like IndieAuth and WebMentions

[maique]

Thank you for your reply.
I now have a Pro account, even though it’s been a gift from a user, and can’t seem to find a way to do this. The post is from Sep 19, so I’m guessing it’s not a priority.

Thanks anyway.

[cjeller1592]

No problem! Yeah, it hasn’t been implemented yet but sometimes it takes a feature request a couple tries for it to be brought to light. Would you (or anyone) prefer it to be an option to disable the rel=nofollow or have it happen by default?

[maique]

Personally I thing the easiest way for non-tech people, would be to have a field on the individual blog settings, where you would insert your mastodon user(s) and have the backend insert that into the code.

It would also mean you could do whatever you want with this nofollow policy, while allowing us to prove ownership of the blog.

[jacobneplokh]

Chiming in here, I would love to see this as an option to disable. Leaving by default might be better, as Matt explained in that post, but an option would be great

[Melyanna]

Hi!

I am joining the conversation since I think having rel=me has become a lot more relevant for write.as and WriteFreely recently, given the efforts that were made to integrate with the fediverse.

[maique]

My feelings exactly. That’s why, the only reason actually, I’d love to have this fixed.

[matt]

Just a heads up to anyone interested: you can now verify your Mastodon account (or any other site) by adding a rel="me" link to your blog description.

Now you can use Markdown and minimal HTML in your blog descriptions! This is...

Here it is in action, on my Mastodon profile:

And it’ll be in the next major WriteFreely release: Support Markdown and rel=me links in blog descriptions by thebaer · Pull Request #531 · writefreely/writefreely · GitHub

[rmasoni]

I’d very much prefer to have the link on my About page. Is this feature being considered?

[matt]

You can always do that by adding the link to the body of your About page. But then you’d need to link directly to that page from Mastodon for the verified check to show up (I believe that should work).

[rmasoni]

Problem is posts do not retain the rel attribute