Recently I read the blog post “Mastodon on your own domain without hosting a server” by Maarten Balliauw, which dealt with how to become more visible in the Fediverse, more precisely in Mastodon, with your own domain, because in contrast to the Indieweb approach, the Fediverse relies on Actors (@USER@INSTANCE
) of the respective instance/platform and can only include your own domain, if it becomes a Fediverse endpoint itself.
In my case, the latter is not possible because this blog is a static site, generated via Hexo and hosted on GitHub. It simply lacks a modifiable active server component.
However, Maarten has found a trick to at least make it findable in Mastadon via his own domain. First, he explains how Fediverse platforms work in general:
– Mastodon (and others) use ActivityPub as their protocol to communicate between “actors”.
– Actors are discovered using WebFinger, a way to attach information to an email address, or other online resource.
– WebFinger lives on /.well-known/webfinger on a server.
His idea was to simply copy the WebFinger file to his server and make it available in the same way, to allow the Fediverse server to find the correct actor, so search for @me@mydomain.xxx
and find @me@my-fediverse-instance.xxx
.
Copy a file and deliver it via Hexo over .wellknown/webfinger
? What can be so difficult about that…
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