How to Verify Your Mastodon Account with Keybase

This article was originally posted on my personal site on April 8, 2017

At the time of this writing, the decentralized network Mastodon has recently surged in popularity out of relative obscurity. Anyone can spin up their own mastodon instance on<!--excerpt--> their own domain, with their own rules. The collective of all inter-connected instances is being called the Fediverse. There is a great list of Mastodon instance here.

Identity Verification

As with any newer social network, there is the question of identity verification. Do you need to create your preferred username on all instances in order to prevent abuse? How are you to verify yourself?

Keybase does not have an in-built option to verify one’s Mastodon account yet. Chris Coyne, Keybase founder, tweeted about whether or not he should wait to implement it, in case there are major structural changes to Mastodon in the oncoming weeks. That seems to be a reasonable concern.

For the time being, you can simply sign a message with Keybase to verify yourself.

Create your Keybase proof

Make sure you have installed the keybase cli.

keybase sign -m "Hi! I'm @you@mastodonserver.tld on Mastodon."

For example, here is mine:

keybase sign -m "Hi! I'm @ryanmaynard@mastodon.cloud on mastodon

Take the result, and make a post on your Mastodon account like so.

Verify a Keybase proof

Take the contents of a posted proof, and place it in a file.

keybase verify < keybase_proof_filename

The results should appear something like this:

Alternative Keybase Proof

Another method you can use, it to post a public proof using the Keybase filesystem, KBFS

You can post a variant of I am <username> on Mastodon

cd /keybase/public/username/
touch mastodonproof.md

Would be visible at

https://keybase.pub/username/mastodonproof.md

You can also add index.html or index.md to your /keybase/username/ folder and it will be accessible at username.keybase.pub

For example, here is mine.

Thank you @todb for this idea, and thank you @seabre for pointing it out to me.

Find Your Friends

If you want to “import” a few of your Twitter followers at the start, there is an unofficial app hosted on Heroku, Mastodon Bridge. It goes without saying: use at your own risk.

Followbots

Someone has put together a followbot, if that is your thing.

Support

If you like Mastodon, don’t hesitate to toss a few dollars to the developer, Gargron. Here is his Patreon page. There are also plenty of issues to be resolved, if you want to help that way.