Highlighting Journalism on Mastodon

Eugen Rochko, writing on Mastodon’s blog today:

To reinforce and encourage Mastodon as the go-to place for journalism, we’re launching a new feature today. You will notice that underneath some links shared on Mastodon, the author byline can be clicked to open the author’s associated fediverse account, right in the app. This highlights writers and journalists that are active on the fediverse, and makes it easier than ever to follow them and keep up with their future work—potentially across different publications. Writers often work with different publishers over the span of their careers, but Mastodon is the perfect platform to amass a loyal audience that you, as the author, truly own, and can take with you across the fediverse.

When Eugen approached us about being one of the first publications to implement this new feature, we jumped at the chance. You may have noticed that we believe pretty strongly in writing and writers, so we’re pleased to be joining The Verge and MacRumors in implementing author bylines. Now, when you see a MacStories post on Mastodon, you can click on the author byline at the bottom of the post to jump to the author’s profile.

What’s more, the feature is incredibly easy to set up. It took Robb Knight about 15 minutes to add the creator OpenGraph tag to MacStories, and ever since, our posts have linked to our authors’ fediverse profiles:

Clicking the author link in a post takes you to that person’s Mastodon profile.

Currently, the authorship feature requires you to use the web version of Mastodon or its official app and have a mastodon.social account or be on a server running recent nightly releases. However, the new feature is part of the Mastodon API, so it shouldn’t be long before third-party apps begin supporting it, too.

Like a lot of people, we follow our favorite publications, but also our favorite writers. Mastodon’s author byline is an excellent way to shine a spotlight on both.