A small step towards supporting the fediverse this Wednesday from Meta was adding the ability to verify your Threads profile on Mastodon. The company is adding support for what's known as "rel=me" links – a way of establishing a relationship between two accounts by pointing links to each other.

Here is how you can verify your Threads account on Mastodon. Importantly, you must do this in the sequence given below for verification to be effective.

1 Add your Mastodon profile to your Threads profile.
2 Add your Threads profile link to one of the "Extra fields" in your Mastodon profile.
3 Save changes.

The verification will probably appear on your Mastodon profile as a green highlighted bar around the Threads link with a checkmark. You can see what this verification looks like, in this screengrab:.

When you do, it essentially pings the Threads page to check for a "rel=me" web attribute and ensures that the link in your Threads profile is pointing back to Mastodon. That "verification" only serves to prove you own the mentioned Threads profile and nothing more. Apart from Mastodon, you can also use this feature to authenticate your Threads profile on services that support the fediverse-a decentralized network of servers-like Wikipedia, Gravatar, and Flipboard.

However, it is not working for some Mastodon users. A Threads engineer has been saying that the team is researching verification-related bugs. At the current point in time, an engineer further said that there is no way to verify your Mastodon profile on Threads.

This update came with a multitude of other features being added to the application - such as a feature to send a post straight into an Instagram DM, custom alt text for images, and an "add someone" button to easily mention someone in a post.

Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, also mentioned this update in the post and said it is one of the "meaningful steps toward adopting open standards and the fediverse." He also added that the company already uses an "early version" of Threads on the web internally. This means we could have a fully functional desktop version of the social network in a few weeks.

Last month, Mosseri stated that because of technical challenges, the Threads app won't support the fediverse at launch. However, he mentioned the company is "fully committed to building support for ActivityPub."
Last year, after Elon Musk took over Twitter, developers built many link verification services for Mastodon as people were migrating to the fediverse.