@manton Answer here: https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/112718583959502007

@tchambers @manton it's up to each server how they approve them as well. So it's piggybacking off the link trending feature that shows up in Explore tab within Mastodon. Some servers only allow specific links, specific domains, etc. It's not code limited.

@manton Probably because they have it point to the social account directly rather than to a local profile page that has a mutual rel-me link between itself and the social account.

The latter is what eg Google+ did.

Elaborated on it here: https://mastodon.social/@voxpelli/112718603677990069

@tchambers @manton the limitation is there to prevent from say rtblog.xyz from putting the meta tags for a reporter from Washington Post, or any other org.

@tchambers @manton Thoughts on why they reinvented a proven flow for this? https://mastodon.social/@voxpelli/112718626409669986

@voxpelli Thank you, something about this was nagging me. Perhaps there can be further discussion since automatic verification of authors/sites hasn’t been finalized.

also, isn’t link rel author enough?

@voxpelli I am constantly finding myself fed up that what Mastodon does is being considered the ‘standard’ for social, distributed web, especially since they seem super happy to complete ignore existing, prior art. Mutual rel-author already exists!

@jsonbecker @manton link tag content has to be an actual URI, while this tag content is apparently a Fediverse handle. Maybe they consider that an important enough distinction?

@chipotle @jsonbecker I think it’s fine to use an “acct:” URI, which everyone already uses for WebFinger.

@manton @voxpelli Bear in mind many authors write or have written for many websites, and you can only verify so many sites on Mastodon (four?). And then if you consider the case a site could choose to maliciously tag an account which did not write an article...

@vmstan @tchambers @manton I think this could be solved well by bidirectional link. If a publication links an author and that author's profile has a backlink to the publication (either the website or the Fediverse account), it could be automatically approved.

@manton 100% agree. Why not use the rel=me as a way to verify the account and let us add the tag to the posts? 🤔

@lukas Yes, I think rel=me should play a role here.

@vladcampos That makes perfect sense to me. Just need consensus on the best tags to use.