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  "canonicalUrl": "https://justingarrison.com/blog/2025-03-31-signal-domain-shortcut",
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  "description": "Send people to your domain to start a Signal chat.",
  "path": "/blog/2025-03-31-signal-domain-shortcut",
  "publishedAt": "2025-03-31T07:05:05.000Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:p7uix7mresfq4nfzxp3klgfa/site.standard.publication/3mmdn7mg2qm2d",
  "textContent": "In an effort to keep using my domain for my identity online I wanted a way for people to start a Signal chat with me without needing to publish my phone number. Signal usernames are an answer for this, but there's still friction between telling someone my username and them sending me a message.\n\nSignal has a way to share a QR code to automatically start a chat but that assumes people can scan something with a camera. I was looking for something as easy as typing in a URL.\n\nIf you open the Signal app settings you'll see this QR code next to your name.\n\n!Signal settings with my name and a QR code button\n\nTap it and it'll open the full QR code, but it also has options at the bottom to share a link.\n\n!Signal QR code with option on the bottom\n\nIf you copy the link then we can make this easier with a 301 redirect.\n\n!Signal URL to my profile\n\nDepending on where and how you publish your website—or just DNS—there are a lot of ways to redirect a URL.\nI'm using hugo on Cloudflare which has a plain text option for URL redirects by placing a file named _redirects at the top of my domain. Other static hosting providers have similar options.\n\nAll I have to do is put this content in the file.\n\nAnd now anyone who goes to the URL <https://justingarrison.com/signal> will open Signal in a new chat.\nAnd if I ever need to change it or stop doing it I can delete the redirect.",
  "title": "Signal Domain Shortcut"
}