Mastodon: How to verify your account

We all know those blue verification badges on mostly all of those platforms and services out there. Well, there is none on Mastodon. In the recent years those badges became more of a status badge than a verification badge. You could only get them when you were "famous" or when you waved with your credit card. So why care at all?

The original idea behind those badges is a good one. It's a badge to make clear: this is really me! So why is it missing on Mastodon?

First things first: you can verify on Mastodon. It just works differently. What is a verification badge worth if you can buy it without being verified as intended? On mastodon you can verify yourself pretty easy.

The best way to do is, is to have and use a personal website. There are other solutions, but in our optinions this is the best way.

For that go to preferences -> public profile -> verification
You'll be presented with a small code snippet, which looks something like this:

<a rel="me" href="https://mastodon.social/@sociabli">Mastodona>

You simply have to add this somewhere on your website. You can use it to link to your Mastodon account in the footer, for example. But you can add it to any link to your Mastodon profile. The important part is rel="me".

As soon as you added this link to your website, you can head over to your Mastodon profile under: preferences -> public profile -> edit

Here you can add extra fields. Fill in a label and paste in the URL of your site, like this:

Mastodon will now visit your site and look for that link from above. As soon as it finds it, Mastodon knows that this is really you and will mark that URL as verified.

This way people can make sure you are really the person you pretend to be. You can also add other services like GitHub for example. This may add even more trust.

By the way! When authorizing Sociabli to cross post for you, we set the permission in a way, that we cannot alter your profile as we don't want to invade sensible information like the one described above.