I recently joined Mastodon, and I’ve been really impressed. The idea of the fediverse is extremely appealing, and I’m still very much in the “explore and have fun” phase of using the service.

One of the first things I wanted to do was verify that I owned my site. My pal Chris wrote a helpful guide covering Mastodon verification that made the process incredibly easy.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get it to work right away with the social icons block, so my solution was to add some custom HTML to get the job done. Nothing fancy, just this little bit of code:

<div style="display: none;"><a rel="me" href="https://mastodon.social/@mmcd">Mastodon</a></div>

After chatting with Chris, he let me know that using the newer Gutenberg social icons block would let you add the necessary HTML rel attribute to the link, no custom HTML needed. All you need to do is install the Gutenberg plugin, then edit the social icons block again. Click on the Mastodon icon, and you can find the Link Rel field under the Block section in the Advanced settings area.

Very cool, and very easy.