{
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"path": "/2025-07-10-the-curious-case-of-missing-mastodon-verification/",
"publishedAt": "2025-07-10T22:51:09.000Z",
"site": "at://did:plc:ex23caczr45rodrfcxrwps6h/site.standard.publication/self",
"tags": [
"apache",
"cloudflare",
"mastodon",
"open-web"
],
"textContent": "Verifying yourself on Mastodon is quite simple: just add the following to the <head> tag of your website:\n\n<link rel=\"me\" href=\"https://mastodon.instance/@username\"/>\n\nThen, add your website to your Mastodon profile, and you should be good to go.\n\nThat wasn’t the case for me.\n\nI added the above link to the header—nothing. I added it to the footer—still nothing. I even tried adding the <a rel=\"me\"...>version as a navigation link in both the top and bottom menus. No luck.\n\nI left it overnight. Still no change.\n\nThen I thought: If I’ve added my website to my Mastodon profile, I should at least see a Mastodon user-agent in the Apache logs. So, I re-added the website to my profile and checked again. Nothing.\n\nHuzzah! A clue.\n\nA quick check in Cloudflare revealed the issue: I had enabled Bot Fight Mode. I disabled it, checked the Apache logs again, and immediately saw Mastodon requests:\n\n[10/Jul/2025:14:22:51 +0000] \"GET /wp-json/activitypub/1.0/actors/0/followers HTTP/1.1\" 200 4251 \"-\" \"Mastodon/4.4.1 (http.rb/5.3.1; +https://indieweb.social/)\"\n\nShortly after that, my website was verified.",
"title": "The Curious Case of Missing Mastodon Verification"
}