Mastodon, an open-source, decentralized alternative to X (formerly Twitter), is rolling out a new feature aimed at making it more appealing to people who use the app to keep up with news and information from writers and journalists. Starting Tuesday, the company will add clickable author bylines to posts that link Mastodon users to the author’s account in the fediverse, giving journalists more exposure and followers.
The new byline goes beyond the typical @username reference that often accompanies links to news publications and posts referring to other written content, such as WordPress blogs or Substack. Instead, the change will display the news publication’s headline and image followed by another reference that includes the author’s profile photo and name.
The feature is already rolling out to some news publishers, including The Verge, MacStories, and MacRumors (and TechCrunch is reportedly waiting on it, too!)
To access these new bylines, you’ll need to use the main Mastodon server at mastodon.social on the web or the official mobile app for now. If you’re using a different Mastodon server, you’ll need to support a recent Mastodon nightly release, but this feature will only work on admin-approved websites.
The company said the new byline will also be supported in its API, which will allow third-party apps to add additional functionality in the future.
The innovation that powers this feature on the backend, Mastodon says, is a new kind of OpenGraph tag. It’s the same kind of tag found on websites that helps determine what kind of thumbnail image appears next to a page’s preview when it’s shared to other services like Mastodon, iMessage, Discord, and more.
This tag is: ''. And it's very simple to implement, as you can add it to your site with just one line of code.
The handle in the tag can refer to any fediverse account, not just Mastodon. That means it can refer to accounts from Flipboard, Threads, WordPress (with the ActivityPub plugin installed), PeerTube, Pixelfed, etc. Furthermore, Mastodon says that it works even without the leading at sign (@) in the handle.
One thing to note, however, is that we do not yet support multiple authors in a co-byline situation. Only the first author is displayed. However, this may be addressed in a future release.
Mastodon has stated that it will propose draft specifications for other ActivityPub platforms in the coming weeks.
Adding tags can encourage more journalists to use federated social networks, as it helps increase exposure. Fediverse has over 10 million users, excluding Threads (which has 170 million monthly users but is not fully federated). Mastodon in particular has about 804,000 monthly active users.
