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Santosh Hari
Santosh Hari

Posted on • Originally published at santoshhari.wordpress.com on

How to verify your GitHub account on Mastadon

Mastadon is the social media service of choice that large sections of people, techies in particular, are flocking to after the recent events at Twitter, mainly because it’s an non-algorithmic decentralized platform.

On a related note, you can follow me on Mastadon.

Verifying your GitHub on Mastadon is a 2-step process

  1. Paste your verification link in your GitHub Profile
  2. Paste your GitHub link in your Mastadon Profile Metadata
  3. That’s it!!

Twitter had an opaque process for verification with the previous management, and, now infamous $8 verification for trolls and bots with the current management> Mastadon, OTOH has a self verification process where you can verify yourself by posting a piece of code on a website or service. The instructions for this can be found under the Edit Profile section as shown below.

Verification: You can verify yourself as the owner of the links in your profile metadata. For that, the linked website must contain a link back to your Mastodon profile. The link back must have a rel=me attribute. The text content of the link does not matter. Here is an example:

This will work with websites where you can edit the homepage source. However, the issue with GitHub is different. The most obvious space appears to be the readme.md in the profile page. However, if you edit this page and insert the verification code, it does not work. You can read a detailed explanation on why.

The trick is to take the verification url and plug it into your profile settings directly ( Edit Profile button on homepage) as shown below.

After updating the GitHub profile with verification code, please make sure you add your GitHub link to your Mastadon Profile Metadata as shown below.

Since the tech crowd loves to use GitHub, why not verify on Mastadon with your GitHub profile? Please share these tips with the community.

Top comments (1)

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vulcanwm profile image
Medea

really helpful! i will try this out