rel-me

From IndieWeb
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Using rel=me on a hyperlink indicates that its destination represents the same person or entity as the current page, which is a key building-block of web-sign-in, IndieAuth, and ✅ distributed identity verification.

indielogin.com uses rel=me links to enable signing into websites such as IndieWeb.org.

See the rel-me specification for more details.

Why

You should add rel="me" to hyperlinks on your home page to your other profiles to:

  • 🪪 enable Web sign-in and IndieAuth using your own domain
  • ✅ distributed verification of your home page and profiles

Web sign-in and IndieAuth allow you to use your domain as your identity, instead of depending on social media identities, and silo sign-in methods.

Distributed verification shows proof that an account on one site is under the control of the same person as another site.

For example:

  • Mastodon will show your home page as verified (with a ✅ and green background) on your Mastodon profile, if your home page links to your Mastodon profile with rel=me.
  • Huffduffer will follow rel="me" links to show your connected social accounts without you having to enter them individually.
  • There is also a browser plugin built by Kevin Marks which allows for this same kind of distributed verification.

How

How to use rel me

See:

How to on WordPress

See:

How to consume rel me

See:

FAQ

Should my rel-me be inside my hCard?

A: Another way of restating that is, should your rel="me" hyperlink also have class="u-url" and be inside your h-card? And the answer is:

A2: Yes it should, because it will enhance your h-card, and make it into a representative h-card, but it is not necessary for rel=me to work with indieauth.

Follow-up Q: This on my blog but it’s not actually what I use for my main indieauth, should it still be setup like that?

Follow-up A: Because it is on your blog, you're likely using that URL as your p-author h-card URL. Thus making sure it has a good representative h-card is a good idea

Can I add rel-me to non-profile pages?

You should not add rel-"me" to pages that doesn't represent the same user as the profile the rel-"me" links to.

One should only add rel-"me" to pages that is seen as representing the same user as the profile it links to. Such pages can be the home page of a single user site or the author pages of a multi user site.

rel-author is often what one wants instead when linking to a profile page from non-profile pages.

Implementations

  • PHP indieweb/rel-me package has functions for getting rel=me URLs on a site, securely deriving profile URLs and securely matching silo backlinking URLs against profile URLs
  • Ruby relparser.rb (part of IndieAuth.com) contains functions for doing the same sort of stuff
  • Python
    • relme.py (part of Ronkyuu) contains functions to discover rel=me URLs on a site, generate normative URLs for both profile and resource URLs and to confirm that a resource URL is authoritative for a given profile URL.
    • IndieWeb Utils implements a get_valid_relmeauth_links function that discovers both one-way and bi-directional rel me links. View the documentation for this function.

Browser Support

verify-me

verify-me by Kevin Marks is a browser extension that checks all rel="me" links for being reciprocal, doing distributed verification.

rel-me verifier

rel=me verifier by Bill Doyle is a userscript inspired by the verify-me extension.

Streetpass

Streetpass is a browser extension that helps you find people's Mastodon profiles by adding them to a list when you browse a site with rel-me links.

Software Support

Mastodon

Mastodon supports a rel="me" URL on profile pages and thus on modern Mastodon instances by default.

Kevin Marks added verified links on his Mastodon.social account. The following information is listed on every profile page:

You can verify yourself as the owner of the links in your profile metadata. For that, the linked website must contain a link back to your Mastodon profile. The link back must have a rel="me" attribute. The text content of the link does not matter.

To add rel=me links to Mastodon:

  1. Click on the cog icon to go to Settings
  2. Click on Edit profile
  3. Copy the link to Mastodon under the verification section
  4. Go to your website your website
  5. Add the link to Mastodon containing the rel="me"
  6. Go back to your Mastodon profile
  7. Add a link to your website in the metadata section
  8. To add a link to GitHub just add a link to your Mastodon account on your GitHub profile by editing the url in the settings.

PixelFed

PixelFed supports rel="me" URL on profile pages since 2018 September.

MediaWiki

MediaWiki extension implementation:

Service Support

Keybase

Keybase has supported rel="me" on profiles since 2014-06-23! E.g.

micro.blog

Micro.blog includes rel="me" on any html page.

Greg McVerry included rel=me links in his h-card on his micro.blog about me page. To add a link with rel="me":

  1. Click on post
  2. click on pages
  3. Create a new page called "About Me"
  4. Add links to other places on the web you control and remember the rel="me"

IndieLogin

Main article: IndieLogin

IndieLogin supports consuming rel="me" for identity and login services via its implementation of RelMeAuth

omg.lol

Main article: omg.lol

omg.lol supports publishing rel="me" on public pages by default.

Wikipedia

Per https://wikis.world/@wikipedia/110396865170645710:

How to:

View source on your User: page and you should now be able to find a link like:

Threads

Threads announced support 2023-08-09:

"We’ve also rolled out Threads support for rel=me links to help you verify your identity on platforms like Mastodon. You can now add your Threads profile link on supported platforms to verify your identity."

https://www.threads.net/@mosseri/post/Cvu2eXurRbB

How to:

  • Open Threads app
  • Tap the 👤 icon in the bottom right
  • Tap the (Edit Profile) button
  • Tap in the [Link] field, enter your domain, and tap "Done" and "Done"

Articles/posts:

Gravatar

Gravatar supports rel-me for account verification since ????-??-??

Letterboxd

Letterboxd supports rel-me since at least 2023-12-07

E.g. this Letterboxd profile:

has a rel="me" link to

Silo Details

Twitter

Twitter no longer seems to include a rel="me" URL on profile pages.

Twitter includes a rel="me" URL on profile pages, but the URL is hidden behind their t.co redirection service. Example as per 2018-09-19: 

<a class="u-textUserColor" target="_blank" rel="me nofollow noopener" href="https://t.co/UT1OXws8A5" title="https://vanderven.se/martijn/">vanderven.se/martijn/</a>

There are a few ways to solve checking whether Twitter has a backlink:

  1. follow the RelMeAuth algorithm that specifies to follow one redirect; or
  2. resolve all rel-me URLs in their entirety; or
  3. use Twitter specific parsing and extract the full URL from the title attribute.

Note that for 1 & 2 there might be issues with requesting the t.co URL. For certain user agents it will not result in an HTTP redirect, but will instead just offer an HTML redirection page.

Some implementations are specifically setting dummy user agents to get around this problem: e.g. this commit on verify-me-locally.

Requests

rel=me and relmeauth

(to be reviewed)

This is my (who?) current interpretation - so people can correct and critique it rather than assert any truthiness to this.

rel=me is intended to mean that the destination represents "the same person as" the current page.

However, it also serves a dual purpose when used for RelMeAuth based authorization. Here, a rel=me link really wants to mean the destination "can claim control over" the current page. You could instead pretend there's a "rel=is-controlled-by" tag to distinguish the two contexts.

Why does this distinction matter?

A page such as github.com/kbsriram cannot (legitimately) claim a rel=me link to github.com. Clearly, the site "github.com" does not represent a "person who is the same as" github.com/kbsriram

However, the root domain on every website does control all its sub pages, so in fact, github.com/kbsriram has an implicit "rel=is-controlled-by" to github.com, but it does not have a rel=me link to github.com

This distinction matters when finding rel=me closures in the two contexts of identity consolidation and relmeauth based authorization.

To make this concrete, let's assume we have these three pages, with these rel=me links on them. 

   myfamily.example.com/tommy [rel=me] -> {plus.google.com/+tommy}
   myfamily.example.com [rel=me] -> {plus.google.com/+tommy}
   plus.google.com/+tommy [rel=me] -> {myfamily.example.com/tommy}

Consolidating Identities use case

Given a page, find me all the pages who are "the same person as" the current page.

The approach is to recursively follow all the rel=me links from the starting page, and return only that subset which is within any loop of rel=me links that include the starting page.

This is so that only a group of mutually verifying pages are returned, or anyone could simply claim they were https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds by putting a rel=me link on their page.

If we started from myfamily.example.com/tommy, we'd get back 

   {myfamily.example.com/tommy, plus.google.com/+tommy}

as the pages who "are the same person as" myfamily.example.com/tommy

And If we started from myfamily.example.com, we'd get back just 

   {myfamily.example.com}


Web sign-in

Main article: Web sign-in

Web sign-in is relmeauth based login.

Given an page, find me all the pages "who can control" the current page. The "current page" is used as the username, and one of the controlling pages is used to login the user, say through OAuth.

In principle (though implementations don't necessarily do this) the approach is still similar, but now there is an implicit assumption that any subpage of a domain is controlled by the bare domain.

In particular, the set of all pages "who can control" myfamily.example.com is 

   {myfamily.example.com, plus.google.com/+tommy, myfamily.example.com/tommy}

because of the implied link that myfamily.example.com/tommy is-controlled-by myfamily.example.com


Edge Cases

Edge cases are questions or issues brought up typically by only one (or a small number) of people, and in practice affect very few people. We document them anyway in the hopes of helping out those few, yet apart from the broader #FAQ, keeping the FAQ focused on frequently asked questions (applicable to more people in general).

What About RDFa Problems

If you use RDFa and are having problems, note that RDFa redefines 'rel' attribute processing that is incompatible with the HTML(5) standards thus rel=me may produce unexpected results inside RDFa.[1]

There is a solution available in RDFa WG mail archives https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdfa/2014Oct/0005.html

Any non-CURIE (e.g. "me") will be ignored in a @rel if there is a @property attribute in the same element. Here is what I recommend to use, which simplifies your markup as you don't need to repeat the mailto:. Drop the @rel from the ul, and use something like this: 

<ul vocab="http://schema.org/">
  <li>
    <a rel="me" property="contactPoint" typeof="ContactPoint" href="mailto:
perpetual-tripper@wwelves.org"><span
property="name">email (smtp)</span></a>
  </li>
</ul>

Articles

See Also

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