More details on federation and verification please

maphew · January 22, 2024, 2:33am

I’m getting started with WriteFreely and trying to get federation and linking with my existing fedi account working. At the end of “(mysite)/me/c/matt” it says:

Verification
Verify that you own another site on the open web, fediverse, etc. For example, enter your Mastodon profile address here, then on Mastodon add a link back to this blog — it will show up as verified there.

I’ve added my mastodon profile (matt (@maphew@indieweb.social) - Indieweb.Social) but what exactly does “on Mastodon add a link back to this blog” mean? On my fedi account profile I have my blog site as an extra field, labelled ‘personal’. Does that count? Am I done? How do I check?

I’ve verified that <link rel="me" href="https://indieweb.social/@maphew" /> does appear in the html head of the site.

In my mastodon client I don’t see my new blog posts. When I search All and Profiles for my blog title I don’t see anything. What am I missing?

Thanks

underlap · January 22, 2024, 5:41pm

Adding a link on Mastodon to your blog means editing your Mastodon profile and using one of the extra fields to link to your blog. E.g. I put this in my profile:

and the result was a verified link:

(I also configured my blog under Customize/Verification to be https://fosstodon.org/@underlap.)

Hope that makes things a bit clearer!

maphew · January 24, 2024, 1:13am

Is the verified link icon status server dependent? Or do I need to call it ‘blog’ instead of personal? I don’t see a checkmark for my profile, matt (@maphew@indieweb.social) - Indieweb.Social.

I did eventually find my blog posts and now I’m following myself, which is a little weird. And boosting my own posts, so people who follow indie-me know about blog-me, which is really weird. It’d be nice to fuse the streams somehow.

underlap · January 24, 2024, 9:21am

Not sure what’s happening with your unverified link - sorry.

As for boosting your blog posts, yes, I’ve done that, although I’ve picked up a handful of followers directly to my blog (plus an indeterminate, but probably tiny, number of RSS subscribers).

But these days I tend to manually toot a link to each new blog post. This essentially treats my blog as if it isn’t part of the Fediverse. Given the small number of Fediverse followers, I’m starting to question the value of the blog being federated. (I think I’ll start a new thread here to discuss that.)