What Are Author Attributions?
New in Mastodon 4.3, author attributions are a way for websites to link an article to the author’s Mastodon account using a special tag on the page called a <meta> tag, short for “metadata”. What this allows for is a method of connecting the content to the author. Basically, anywhere you post this article on Mastodon, and no matter who posts it, the author’s account will be linked to it and accessible from the embedded content of the article. Ultimately this makes it easier to connect to authors on the Fediverse, even if you weren’t following them yet.
How Do You Use Them?
As a Reader
This is super simple, if your client supports it, somewhere on the embed there will be a link to the author’s own Mastodon account, click on that and you’re good to go!
As an Author
This is going to depend on your CMS, but what you need is some way to modify the <head> of your article pages, which is the part of the page that contains all of the metadata relevant to the webpage including any kind of SEO or relevant information for link embeds. There are a few different ways this can be done on WordPress, either through an SEO plugin or a bespoke fediverse plugin (like how we do it here, but I will defer any questions about our implementation to Kyle, our WP admin). My personal blog, The Digital Renaissance, on the other hand, uses Ghost as its CMS and you can use the built-in “code injection” feature to put your metadata right into the article from the CMS.
The specific tag you need to put in is formatted as follows: <meta name="fediverse:creator" content="@your-handle@your.instance">. This tag can be copied from the web view of your instance in the “Public Profile” section of your user settings under “verification.” On that same page, you need to then type in the address of the website(s) that you will be publishing from. This particular step is to ensure that people aren’t falsely attributing articles to you. If you didn’t allow the site on your profile, it will not generate the attribution, even if the metadata is present in the article.
Why Do I Think They’re So Cool?
This is one more step in the Fediverse to really help build a community. This means that people can follow my writing from anyone who shares it. Over time this will make the accounts of the authors of these posts more discoverable, which will, in turn, help connect the community around their writing just that much easier. This is especially true for those of us who write for multiple publications, as you can follow us directly instead of just having to follow the whole publication to see our work.
Conclusion
Overall I think this feature is great and it’s one of my favorite tech releases over the past few weeks (although that new Mac mini and the M4 Pro and higher chips coming with Thunderbolt 5 are definitely contenders as well). This is going to help online writers build communities around their writing faster and more efficiently. I would like to see this taken advantage of more often by publications on the fediverse, but that will take time. How have you been liking author attributions? Have you been seeing many of them? Let me know in the comments or over on Mastodon.
