Mastodawn

Dylan Freedman Dec 22, 2022

Anyone familiar with the way Mastodon handles verifying URLs? At the Washington Post we're working on adding verified rel="me" and Mastodon links in our author profiles, but we're seeing mixed results on verification actually going through. It seems non-deterministic(?)

@dylan (me): works
@jeremybmerrill: does not work even though he's on the same server as me
@zubakskees : works
(+ more)

The author pages on the Post are identical in terms of linking back to Mastodon. #mastodon

Russ Dec 22, 2022

@dylan @jeremybmerrill @zubakskees

There are a variety of hiccups with link verification (see https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/22418 and linked issues).

@info @e_urq I don't suppose y'all could take a look at the logs for the fetch requests for Jeremy's verified link? I did a spot check on the linked page and it looks valid, if potentially a bit challenging to parse.

Website verification: add a / fallback to the Accept request header for improved website compatibility · Issue #22418 · mastodon/mastodon

Steps to reproduce the problem Run a PHP site on Apache HTTP Server Add Options MultiViews to your .htaccess file, but don't add MultiviewsMatch Any and instead configure AddType application/x-...

GitHub

Evan Urquhart 🏳️‍⚧️

@theruss @dylan @jeremybmerrill @zubakskees @info This is more technical than I go, but I've passed it along to team members who could help.

Jeremy B. Merrill Dec 22, 2022

@e_urq thanks! I also emailed y'all's group email this morning in hopes that maybe the server admins could check their own logs.

Simon Fondrie-Teitler Dec 22, 2022

@jeremybmerrill @e_urq have you tried removing and re-adding it? I know it's cached, so it's helpful to prompt it to recheck the site.

Jeremy B. Merrill Dec 22, 2022

@simon @e_urq yes, sadly, several times :(

Simon Fondrie-Teitler Dec 22, 2022

@jeremybmerrill @e_urq what about linking to https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/jeremy-b-merrill/?cachebust ?

Simon Fondrie-Teitler Dec 22, 2022

@jeremybmerrill @e_urq (with the ?cachebust at the end)

Jeremy B. Merrill Dec 22, 2022

@simon @e_urq I'll give it a try, good idea

Simon Fondrie-Teitler Dec 22, 2022

@jeremybmerrill @e_urq Seems like that still doesn't work. journa.host is on masto.host, which doesn't allow access to the logs enough to figure out of there's anything in there. Only theory I have right now is the post's site seems to delay returning information by 8 seconds or so if the user agent isn't a browser agent, which might be hitting a timeout.

Simon Fondrie-Teitler Dec 22, 2022

@jeremybmerrill I wonder if link previews work. https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/jeremy-b-merrill/

Simon Fondrie-Teitler Dec 22, 2022

@jeremybmerrill vs Dylan https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/dylan-freedman/

Dylan Freedman - The Washington Post

Dylan Freedman is a software engineer at The Washington Post with a focus on elections and campaign finance.

Dylan Freedman

Jeremy B. Merrill Dec 22, 2022

@e_urq although let me slightly eat my words and note that the email appears to have just sent just now because Outlook is awful :)

Russ Dec 22, 2022

@e_urq @dylan @jeremybmerrill @zubakskees @info

Thanks, Evan.

I've been lobbying @Gargron and the other wonderful folks developing Mastodon to surface more information about what's going on with link validation in the UI, because so many people are trying to do it (which is great) and sometimes it mysteriously doesn't with (which isn't).

I'd be happy to pay a moderate bounty to get it done.

Russ Dec 30, 2022

@e_urq @dylan @jeremybmerrill @zubakskees @info @Gargron

@robpc to the rescue!

Jeremy, that link isn't being verified because the page it's on is bigger than 1MB. Check this out:

https://mstdn.social/@[email protected]ocial/109604273331298601

https://mastodon-link-debugger.vercel.app/profile/@[email protected]

Rob Cannon (@[email protected])

At work, we've been experimenting with link validation and there were several more hurdles than I expected. I put together this link debugger tool as a way to show the problems we found that can prevent validation, and as an excuse to start to play around with the Mastodon API. If you are interested in giving it a spin, just enter your username or profile link and it will evaluate the the links in your profile. https://mastodon-link-debugger.vercel.app/ #Mastodon #LinkVerification #Vercel #SvelteKit

Indieweb.Social

Chris Zubak-Skees Dec 30, 2022

@theruss @e_urq @dylan @jeremybmerrill @info @Gargron @robpc Thanks, Russ. Rob's the technical architect on our team. We've got a PR in to Mastodon to remove that limit, but we'll probably reduce the page weight before that one lands.