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I've read many requests to add Mastodon links to GitHub profiles for verification and discovery purposes.
My team is working on allowing you to add a number of social profile links, but given upcoming holiday vacations, it won't ship until the new year. We don't want to rush something out at the potential cost of disrupting what is generally a quiet time for our engineers.
Ordinarily, I wouldn't talk about in progress work on social media, but y'all seem like you can keep a secret.
You can now add up to four social account links to your GitHub profile which render with a sprinkling of formatting support for our most popular platforms. Yes, the resulting links links will satisfy Mastodon verification requirements when rendered.
To get started, visit your profile and click the "Edit profile" button in the sidebar.
Glad y'all are enjoying this feature. A small number of you are reporting that Mastodon accounts are not being recognized as such in our UI.
We make a NodeInfo request to non-obvious hosts to check server metadata. Requests to some hosts are hitting our aggressive timeout. We're working on making this process more resilient.
You may have better luck by removing and re-adding the link to re-trigger the check. In any event, links will still function as expected, even for verification.
@derekprior They are seriously doing this? If so, and this isn't a joke, that would be cool.
@katmmoss It is live now.
@derekprior That's awesome. I think I'll go edit my profile, too; I'm https://github.com/cambridgeport90. (my contributions are all over the place; both technical documentation and code for various projects.)
@derekprior @katmmoss I don’t see it, for some reason. It’s been saved in this state for five minutes or so — do I just need to wait for a cron job to update things, or something else?
@Meyerweb I would assume so, but I’m not 100% sure. This was the first I’ve heard of it myself.
@Meyerweb @derekprior @katmmoss yeah it's doing this for me currently too. Also do we have to do anything special to get it verified on our Mastodon profile?
@pauldoesdev I already had a link to GitHub on my Mastodon profile. So I had to edit and save my profile (without making any changes though) so Mastodon triggered a “re-crawl” of the GitHub profile.
@mvsde cheers. That's sorted it on the Mastodon side but it still doesn't look nice on the GitHub side 
@pauldoesdev I got the fancy icon when I put the link to Mastodon in the “Social accounts” section on GitHub.
@Meyerweb We make a NodeInfo request to the host to see if it is a Mastodon host, which your host certainly supports. The request must have failed for some reason. We're monitoring things like this to see how we can improve.
In the meantime, maybe remove the mastodon link, save, then re-add it and save again to see if that kicks things off for you.
@derekprior @katmmoss any thoughts about showing a website on a profile as validated if there is a rel=me link back to GitHub profile?
@michael We haven't though about this. Not sure we want to get into that type of verification right now.
@derekprior very cool by the way.
@katmmoss @derekprior the verification thing has worked for a while, I verified my profile several weeks ago. Looks like the mastodon-awareness thing is new though, I’ll have to check that out!
@derekprior Lovely, congrats on shipping this! It seems like it's auto-detecting the social network type now instead of letting you choose, is it based on a list of domain names? My Masto profile link gets a generic link icon, instead of the Mastodon logo.
@gosha We use the NodeInfo API for non-obvious hosts. It's possible that either the NodeInfo request failed on on of our ends or your host has NodeInfo disabled.
We're monitoring failures to see how we might improve things, but in the meantime, if NodeInfo is enabled for your host, you can try removing the link, saving, then re-adding.
@derekprior Thank you for the quick response! I guess this is because my instance is running Hometown, which is a fork of Mastodon (https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown). Here's the nodeinfo for my instance, if your team would like to add support: https://merveilles.town/nodeinfo/2.0
@gosha Ah yes, we'll probably take a look at what we have after a week or two of collecting data and decide what to do from there.
| R.I.P Natenom @derekprior: Thanks! Nice, #GitHub even recognizes that a link in the profile is a Mastodon account!
@derekprior Woot! 
Amazing news! Already kicked out the birdsite and added the mastodon link on mine! 
@foosel @derekprior thanks for reminding me to remove the bird site!
@derekprior Awesome. For orgs too?
@derekprior Having the mastodon logo there is cute!
@derekprior Wow! Just add it to my GitHub account and got a verfied label. Nice feature!
@derekprior It's not working for me, yet. I get the exact same UI as shown in the screenshot. But when I enter my mastodon.social Link, it's not being picked up as Mastodon link (icon doesn't change).
@preya In the case of non-obvious hosts, We make a NodeInfo request to the host to see what software its running. The request has an aggressive time out set, and I'm guessing it failed in your case.
We're working on making this more resilient, but in the meantime, removing and re-adding your link may lead to success.
@derekprior Thanks! How do you determine if a host is "obvious"? Is there a specific allowlist? Shouldn't mastodon.social be an obvious host?
3 out of 4, now who do I ask at https://stackoverflow.com/
? @derekprior
@derekprior but the links aren't visible in the profile right?
Or is it a caching issue? (I was only able to test on the mobile site)
@jandamm Just an oversight on our mobile responsive view. We'll get them rendered there too. Thanks for letting us know.
@derekprior Thank you!
This is awesome.
@derekprior I guess all social networks visible in the screenshot of https://hachyderm.io/@derekprior/109525845683576253 are today compatible?
@themimitoof There have perhaps been some small changes, but roughly that, yes. We'll see what folks are adding over the next week or two and decide what to do from there.
@derekprior this is awesome, thanks!
@derekprior thats so cool! It would be great if it could properly resolve handles using WebFinger as well (so @ networkexception @ social.nwex.de becomes @ networkexception @ nwex.de)
@derekprior I had it in the website previously, it is not recognized until you move it to the new social media links
@derekprior tried it five times now and it's still not showing. 
@kaiserkiwi Looks like it's working to me...
@derekprior hm. I still don't see it. It's also not visible in the app. Is this probably a cache thing?
@derekprior Ah! I see! It's visible on desktop but not on mobile yet.
@derekprior Thanks so much for this! If it still doesn’t seem to be recognizing a request, is there anything on the Mastodon server side you recommend investigating?
@misty Looks like that instance is running `hometown`, which we do not recognize as a mastodon instance. We’ve seen this a couple of times today so that might be something we want to add support for.
@derekprior Aha, that makes sense. Hometown is a friendly fork with a few additional features that’s kept up to date with mainline Mastodon.
@derekprior Since it is actually Mastodon, it hopefully shouldn't be difficult to support. Let me know if there's information I can provide that would help.
@misty If you remove and re-add your link, it should now be recognized with a mastodon icon.
We will likely reprocess existing links at some point, but want to fix a few more things first.
@derekprior It worked! Thank you so much - lightning fast response time there.
@derekprior @misty hey @darius, Github might add support specifically for Hometown (:
@liaizon @derekprior @misty happy to help on my end as the maintainer if needed
ung @darius @liaizon @derekprior @misty it worked ok for me, on Hometown
@derekprior Absolutely love to see the change and awesome work by the team! Would love to see Flickr as an option in the future ^_^
@derekprior The next phase is for you to check links back have rel=me on and show the green ticks too. Then I don't need to use the browser plugin. https://www.kevinmarks.com/distributed-verify.html
@derekprior I'm writing a serverless fork of mastodon... not technical a mastodon server... is there some required information needed in the NodeInfo call I can provide to get similar verification or should I just spoof whats in a regular mastodon response?
@derekprior Indeed, that helped. Thanks!
@derekprior FYI I was having the same problem, and it was my adblocker -- temporarily disabling it made the check work.
(I figured it out after I watched someone's screen recording in which it was clear that the check was supposed to happen on the edit screen, before you save -- and I could see that absolutely nothing was happening for me.)
@derekprior that's awesome!
In mobile, it looks like social links are not shown. Desktop view of the profile shows it