Mastodon link verification for the root site
Opened this issue · 2 comments
As you may know, Mastodon is a decentralized social media platform that values privacy and community. Many users, including myself, appreciate being able to verify our profiles on other platforms to demonstrate that we are who we say we are.
I understand that adding this feature may take time and effort, but it would be valuable for Mastodon users who utilize your plugin for SEO purposes.
It would be excellent if the plugin could do a rel=\”me\” in metatags for the whole site.
Link Verification on Mastodon Documentation
We were pondering about this exact feature addition as well. TSF is historically the last to adopt new features since we do not like to send updates every week to users and believe in shipping slow, and shipping stable. Your feature request has little to do a little with SEO and there is already a free plugin that does what you need.
People say every day that the number of plugins is detrimental to your security and performance. It is not true IF each and every plugin is made by a good programmer. It is time-consuming for us to implement, test, and ship a feature that was already made into a plugin by somebody else. It is not efficient and weirdly, goes against our main selling points.
The worst case scenario is that Mastodon ends up a dead fad (although I am rooting for it!) and we are stuck maintaining the verification you proposed forever -- because if we did implement such a feature, we would also have to consider the long term implications of not only maintaining it but removing it. That is how far ahead we think with TSF. It is a balancing act and it is not always easy.
With all that said, we are currently toying with the idea of adding experimental extensions, with an alpha label. The idea is, that we release something early as an option, but it might disappear any day and has 0 support. Would you like that, or rather install a plugin not made by us?
The best I can give you is hard maybe. What you want is not SEO really (although you can argue it is part of Google's E-A-T), easy to achieve without a plugin, there is already a plugin that does this and we have to allocate our resources wisely. I am making a new website myself and thought it would be neat to have this in TSF, but I ended up just adding it to the header and moved on.
I apologize if this is not what you wanted to hear and thank you for understanding.
Maybe later: Mastodon implies it must be a <a href rel=me></a> element. Gutenberg still needs a proper method for adding attributes to elements, and I'm not one to fiddle endlessly with alpha software.
Mastodon's documentation states they support a <link rel=me ???=/> tag, but they don't expound on any details for this type of implementation. If they could make this an adequately documented standard, I'd happily add support for it.