Like many in the past week, I have been having a serious look at Mastodon as an alternative to Twitter.
Mastodon is a social network that is distributed across many servers that have their own smaller communities, and federate with other servers to provide a more “global” social network.
There are many servers out there that you can choose from. Alternatively, you can also self-host your Mastodon server, or use one of many hosted instances, “Mastodon as a service”.
In recent hours, I have seen many people wanting to host their own servers, which is great fun! Self-hosting also has the added benefit of being able to have a Mastodon account on your own domain, and you own your data.
Now, I don’t really care about that (yet?). I ran my own mail server back in the day and am very happy with someone running it for me now. The same goes with Mastodon: I trust the folks at Mastodon.online, the server I joined, to do a much better job at this than I will ever do.
However, there is one thing I would like my own server for: discoverability. Much like with e-mail, I want folks to have an easy address to find me, and one that I can keep giving out to everyone even if later I switch to a different Mastodon server. A bit like e-mail forwarding to your ISP’s e-mail service.
The good news is: you can use your own domain and share it with other folks. It will link to your actual account.
Go on, try it. Search for @[email protected], and you will find my @[email protected].
Reading “how to implement a basic ActivityPub server”, there are a couple of things that stand out:
Since discovery is what I was after, WebFinger seemed like the only thing I would need to implement.
WebFinger lives on /.well-known/webfinger on a server. For Mastodon, your server will be queried for accounts using an endpoint that looks like this:
And indeed, if I look at my Mastodon server’s webfinger for my account, I get a response back!
GET https://mastodon.online/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct:[email protected]
{
"subject": "acct:[email protected]",
"aliases": [
"https://mastodon.online/@maartenballiauw",
"https://mastodon.online/users/maartenballiauw"
],
"links": [
{
"rel": "http://webfinger.net/rel/profile-page",
"type": "text/html",
"href": "https://mastodon.online/@maartenballiauw"
},
{
"rel": "self",
"type": "application/activity+json",
"href": "https://mastodon.online/users/maartenballiauw"
},
{
"rel": "http://ostatus.org/schema/1.0/subscribe",
"template": "https://mastodon.online/authorize_interaction?uri={uri}"
}
]
}
Sweet!
The next thing I tried was simply copy-pasting this JSON output to my own server under .well-known/webfinger, and things magically started working.
In other words, if you want to be discovered on Mastodon using your own domain, you can do so by copying the contents of https://<your mastodon server>/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct:<your account>@<your mastodon server> to https://<your domain>/.well-known/webfinger.
One caveat: this approach works much like a catch-all e-mail address. @[email protected] will match, unless you add a bit more scripting to only show a result for resources you want to be discoverable.
Discoverability, at this stage, is one of the things that matter to get a proper social graph going. Over the past days, there were a couple of tools I found very useful in finding Twitter folks on Mastodon:
Good luck! And give @[email protected] a follow if you make the jump to Mastodon.
Edit: Seems there is a GitHub issue which requests custom domains as well.