In what looks like a very smart move, the team at Mastodon just released a very nice new feature for media organizations, journalists and bloggers: when someone shares a link to an article by certain news outlets like The Verge, MacStories, or MacRumors, the official Mastodon app as well as the web version will now show a direct link to an author’s fediverse profile.
What is primarily aimed at journalists and news organizations for now, is a feature that might soon work for bloggers and anyone sharing posts on their personal sites, too. And it makes a lot of sense in this context: While I always try to mention the authors of the articles I am sharing on social media, I also forget to do it at times. Others also just don’t want to invest the effort to search for the respective Mastodon, Threads, or other handles of the person who wrote the post every time they share a link. And that’s okay, I guess. With this new author byline, a direct connection between the article and the corresponding fediverse accounts is established that increases the visibility of authors and their accounts a lot.
To make the new feature work, the Mastodon team decided to invent a new Open Graph meta tag:
<meta property="fediverse:creator" content="@matthiasott@mastodon.social" />
The handle can be any fediverse account, including Flipboard, Threads, WordPress (with the ActivityPub plugin installed), PeerTube, Pixelfed, and many others. And because the feature is also part of Mastodon’s API, it can be implemented by third party apps like Mona or Ivory in the future.
For now, the feature only works with a small number of news outlets. On the Mastodon blog, Eugen Rochko mentions that it will only show up for links to moderator-approved websites and that support for the tag is currently rolled out on mastodon.social and any other server that uses a recent Mastodon nightly release. It sounds a bit like admins running their own instances (on a nightly release) might already be able to approve sites as well, including personal websites and blogs. But I couldn’t confirm this yet.
Anyway, I just added the Open Graph tag to my site. And although it doesn’t work for personal blogs yet, it also doesn’t hurt and I’m already looking forward to the day we will all see our account handles appear underneath our posts.
PS: While adding the meta tag, I discovered that I urgently need to take care of my Open Graph images next… so stay tuned.
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