As I mentioned at the end of my first post on Mastodon, I’ve been following Martin Fowler’s notes on his own journey. His November 1 memo on verification interested me, especially in light of Twitter’s recent update to charge $8 for the blue check mark.
As Fowler explained it, Mastodon being decentralized (unlike Twitter) means verification is up to each server. Whoever runs it can verify members however they wish–or not at all. The approach to verification he describes and implements is what he calls cross-association. By adding a <link> element to the <head> of his personal website with an href attribute for his corporate Mastodon profile, Mastodon “sees” the link and marks it as verified.
I followed Fowler’s example to do the same thing with my Mastodon profile. I updated the header.php of the WordPress theme I’m using this way:
<head>
<meta charset=”<?php bloginfo( ‘charset’ ); ?>”>
<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1″>
<link rel=”profile” href=”//gmpg.org/xfn/11″>
<link rel=”me” href=”https://mastodon.cloud/@genxjamerican”>
<?php wp_head(); ?>
</head>
With that change made, my Mastodon profile now looks like this:
This way, people who follow me on Mastodon know that I control this website as well.