Meta took a small step in direction of supporting the fediverse by including the flexibility to confirm your Threads profile on Mastodon on Wednesday. The corporate introduced that it’s including assist for “rel=me” hyperlinks — a method to set up a relationship between two accounts by pointing hyperlinks to one another.

Right here is how one can confirm your Threads profile on Mastodon. Notably, you must observe the order for the verification to work.

1. Add your Mastodon profile to your Threads profile.
2. Add your Threads profile hyperlink to one of many “Further fields” in your Mastodon profile.
3. Save the adjustments.

The verification will doubtless seem in your Mastodon profile within the type of a inexperienced highlighted bar across the Threads hyperlink together with a checkmark. You may see what the verification appears like within the screengrab under.

Picture Credit: Screenshot by TechCrunch

Once you full the method, the Mastodon server basically pings the Threads web page to examine for a “rel=me” net attribute and confirm that hyperlink in your Threads profile is pointing again to Mastodon. This ‘verification’ solely exhibits that you’re the proprietor of the talked about Threads profile and nothing else. Other than Mastodon, you may also use this attribute to confirm your Threads profile on companies supporting the fediverse comparable to Wikipedia, Gravtar, and Flipboard.

Nonetheless, this technique just isn’t working for some Mastodon customers. A Threads engineer talked about that the staff is wanting into verification-related bugs. Moreover, the engineer stated that there is no such thing as a means so that you can confirm your Mastodon profile on Threads in the meanwhile.

This replace got here with a slew of different options being added to Threads, together with the flexibility to ship a submit on to Instagram DMs, letting customers add customized alt textual content for pictures, and a button to simply point out somebody in a submit.

Instagram head Adam Mosseri additionally famous this replace in his submit and stated it is without doubt one of the “significant steps in direction of adopting open requirements and the fediverse.” He additionally stated that the corporate has been utilizing an “early model” of Threads on the internet internally. This implies we are able to get a completely useful desktop model of the social community in a couple of weeks.

Final month, Mosseri stated that due to technical challenges, the Threads app gained’t assist the fediverse on the launch. However he talked about that the corporate is “totally dedicated to constructing assist for ActivityPub.”

Final yr, after Elon Musk took over Twitter, builders constructed many hyperlink verification companies for Mastodon as folks had been migrating to the fediverse.