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How To Create a Custom Name on Mastodon @pkellner@peterkellner.net

Updated: at 02:12 PM

The Problem

How many of us know people that are still using aol.com for their email? I know for me, when I see that I immediately think “dinosaur”. I know that’s bad, and I shouldn’t pre-judge, but it’s hard not to. That’s why I created my own domain (peterkellner.net) a very long time ago. I allowed me to not have to keep telling people I’ve changed my address. You don’t know that my email is hosted on gmail, and that’s just how I want it.

We can do the same thing pretty easily with Mastodon. it took me about 3 hours to figure it out, but hopefully, you will be faster.

Oh, and follow me at @pkellner@peterkellner.net

The Solution Using GitHub Pages

I happen to use GitHub Pages and Jekyll for this blog, but it really doesn’t matter what you use to make this work. All you need to do is figure out a way such that your Mastodon configuration file is referenced from a URL on your web site that looks like this:

{YourDomain}/.well-known/webfinger

Or, in my case, https://peterkellner.net/.well-known/webfinger

To get this file, you need to browse to your current Mastodon instance at a URL like this:

{Your Mastodon Host}/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct:accountname@server

or in my case:

https://techhub.social/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct:pkellner@techhub.social

Then, using wget, or however you want, copy that file to your own static server so it responds from the URL

{YourDomain}/.well-known/webfinger ( https://peterkellner.net/.well-known/webfinger )

Because I use Jekyl and GitHub Pages, I had to also update my _config.yaml file to have the additional line:

include: [ “.well-known” ]

Here is the commit I did that with.

but this may not be necessary for you.

See you at Mastodon!

@pkellner@peterkellner.net

Reference

Everything I know I got from:

https://blog.maartenballiauw.be/post/2022/11/05/mastodon-own-donain-without-hosting-server.html

Check out the ORM (Object Relational Mapper) PRISMA. The database access method I use in all my projects