Jan van den Berg

j11g.com

Tag: Mastodon

  • Five things I’d like to see in Mastodon

    I love Mastodon. I am a believer.

    Not that I think it will replace Twitter or anything like that. But it is definitely its own thing. True to the original ideas of the internet.

    There are however a few things I would really like to see. In no particular order.

    Threads

    Threads in the timeline feel clunky. I see replies to long running threads scattered through my timeline. They are hard to follow and they make the timeline messy. Threads should be bundled together more coherently in my timeline.

    Algorithm

    There I said it. I *do* think there is room for an algorithm on Mastodon. Specifically one that is proposed by jefftk in his blogpost ‘User-Controlled Algorithmic Feeds’.

    It makes a lot of sense since the user is in control.

    Hover for profile

    Easy one I think. I want to hover over a (profile)name and get a popup with the most relevant information for that profile without going to that profile! I don’t want to leave my timeline. It’s since switching to Mastodon that I noticed how much I rely on this (also see: Verification 👇).

    Advanced View

    Could be more advanced. I want different (more!) and persistent columns for different hashtags or searches.

    Verification

    Sure rel=me is one way to verify. But with more and more brands and people moving to Mastodon I’d like to see another (better?) way to verify accounts. Not everyone has their own site.

    But, this is hard. Also see bird-site. And I also don’t have a solution.

    I do like presscheck.org though. It’s a good effort. But I worry how this scales.


  • How to get green links on your Mastodon profile with WordPress

    How to get green links on your Mastodon profile with WordPress

    The green links on your Mastodon profile indicate that you are the owner of that link i.e. that website.

    You can achieve this by adding a little line of code to your website (see Link verification).

    When you have a basic HTML website, adding this piece of code is this trivial.

    However when your site runs on WordPress, it’s a bit different.

    I found a tutorial that only works with a newer version of Gutenberg (in anticipation of a 2023 WordPress release). But there is also another — easier — way.

    When you run a regular WordPress 6.1 site, this is how you do it.

    I link to my social media profiles from a menu. My guess is that most people want to use it like this. And one of these links in my menu is a Mastodon link. This is the link where you need to add the me value for the rel attribute.

    These are the steps:

    1. Select Appearance
    2. Select Menus
    3. Select your specific Menu (in my case Social Footer Menu).
    4. Select Screen Options
    5. Checkmark the Link Relationship (XFN)
    6. add me to your menu under Link Relation (XFN).
    7. Save!

    Step 5 is the trick. This step will add an extra — otherwise hidden — option field to your links.

    I got this tip from this here.

    Now you just have to wait for your Mastodon instance to check your links. This happens periodically (I would say daily?). But I notice you can also trigger this check by (making a change and) saving your Mastodon profile.

    And that’s it.

    Look how green!

    Your Mastodon instance will check your links periodically. But I notice you can also trigger it by (making a change and) saving your profile.