Alias your mastodon account to your own domain with Netlify redirect

Did you know you could use your own domain for your mastodon username without hosting your own instance? It can be done with a single Netlify redirect rule.

Mastodon client showing @phil@hawksworx.com resolving to @philhawksworth@indeweb.social

One of the nice things of Mastodon is that you can move from one instance to another if you ever feel the need. Your username is a combination of your handle and the name of your instance. I'm currently on the indieweb.social instance and very happy there. But perhaps one day I'll want to move to a different instance. If I do, it would be nice to have control of a consistent username. And to have it associated with the domain name that I control would be lovely.

As it happens this is can be simple to achieve. We can use webfinger to associate an address on a domain we control, with a username on any Mastodon instance.

So instead of sharing my username as @philhawksworth@indieweb.social, I could use @phil@hawksworx.com

Phil Nash gave a good explanation of this on his own website.

As Phil explains:

Implementing WebFinger requires your domain to respond to a request to /.well-known/webfinger with a JSON representation of the associated accounts. If you have a Mastodon account you can check out what your WebFinger JSON looks like by making a request to https://#{instance}/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct:#{username}@#{instance}.

His solution is nice and simple, but got me thinking that we could simplify even further and achieve this with a single redirect rule, which can be achieved very simply with Netlify, where I happen to host this site.

All we need is to add a rewrite rule. This in the netlify.toml will do the trick:

[[redirects]]
  from = "/.well-known/webfinger"
  to = "https://INSTANCE_NAME/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct:USER_HANDLE@INSTANCE_NAME"
  status = 200

I did that for this site:

[[redirects]]
  from = "/.well-known/webfinger"
  to = "https://indieweb.social/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct:philhawksworth@indieweb.social"
  status = 200

Now, requests to hawksworx.com/.well-known/webfinger will return the user data held by indieweb.social, and anyone searching for me by the username @phil@hawksworx.com will find me. If I ever decide to move to a new instance, I can keep the same address by simply updating this one rule.