Mastodon First Thoughts & Verification
Like a lot of people, I made a move over to Mastodon from primarily using Twitter after the sale to a certain billionaire and resulting chaos and redundancies. After using it for a while, I thought I'd write down some thoughts.
From the off, I loved the sound of it: decentralised servers, different rules depending on those servers, and an interconnectedness between them. The control being distributed around the fediverse is a very important aspect; clearly centralised control with one company - or individual - does not work in the long term.
After picking a server (Fosstodon, by quickly looking through those advertised and deciding based on vibes (✌️) only), I created my account and got settled in. The whole ethos of the platform (and, now, I am talking exclusively about the Fosstodon instance) is much friendlier and calmer than one could be used to, having come from Twitter. That could be due to a lack of antagonistic bots, generally fewer users, people more generally separated by topics of interest, or a combination of all those options (and others besides).
Of course, users are not limited to following people on the same server, but the benefit of sticking to a server on which you will share interests with other people is the Local (AKA Community) feature. It shows the latest posts (AKA Toots) from other users on the server, regarless of whether you follow them or not. This makes for more of, as the name suggests, a Community feel in your corner of the Fediverse.
Much has been made of Twitter's verification processes recently, with good reason. The Mastodon verification feature is significantly removed from the sometimes arbitary (and now wallet-based) Bird Site version: there is no profile verification. There is, however, site verification, which I have done:
Ghost Verification
All that is needed for this is to add some code to the site in question, which should prove it is yours. All that is needed is:
<a rel="me" href="https://fosstodon.org/@underwood">Mastodon</a>As this site is running on Ghost and the Primary and Secondary Navigation links only accept URLs, I had a few things to do to get this added: first was the code, which is stuck in the body code injection; the other is some code adjustment that I added to hide this link (I already have a few links to the Mastodon profile, so another was unnecessary). For this last point, I added the following to the snippet:
<a rel="me" href="https://fosstodon.org/@underwood" style="display: none">Mastodon</a>