I think this is a good incentive for Journalists to be more active on the fediverse.
It works in a pretty neat way:
We’ve decided to create a new kind of OpenGraph tag—the same kind of tags you have on your website to determine which thumbnail image will appear on the preview for the page when shared on Discord, iMessage, or Mastodon. It looks like this: <meta name=“fediverse:creator” content=“@Gargron@mastodon.social” />.
via: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/07/highlighting-journalism-on-mastodon/
A neat way would be to re-use one the 200 already existing standards like rel="author" or even rel="me" (which mastodon already supports anyway). This solution just is just NIH-driven development.
I think the difference lies in two things:
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You can share an article from a user of a different instance. In this case, your instance will have to look up the rel=“author” tag and check whether the URL is a fediverse instance. I’m not sure whether this is scalable as compared to a tag that directly indicates that the author is on the fediverse. Imagining a scenario where there are 100, 1000, 10,000, or 100,000 instances on different versions.
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The tag is to promote that the author is on the fediverse. If the rel=“author” tag points to twitter for example, maybe Eugen Rochko + team didn’t want a post on the fediverse to link to twitter.
These are my thoughts and idk if they’re valid. But I think just reusing the rel=“author” isn’t the most elegant solution.
I know that mastodon already uses rel=“me” for link verification (I use it on mu website + my mastodon account), but that’s a different purpose - that’s more for verification. There’s still no way of guaranteeing that the rel=“author” tag points to a fediverse account. You’re putting the onus on the mastodon instance.
