Create a Verified Keybase Link on your Mastodon profile

My Mastodon’s profile header

As I recently joined (#TwitterExodus) the free, federated, and open source Mastodon social network based on ActivityPub, going through my profile setup, I noticed that it allows you to verify yourself as the owner of the links/resources you can set in your profile (EDIT: it’s working for me on infosec.exchange, but I’ve seen users struggling on other instances e.g. mastodon.social, where apparently the verification is not enabled by admins).

Being able to prove who you are, and that you are the owner of certain key resources online becomes more and more important these days. Scams, impersonations, phishing emails to steal your (online) identity is becoming too common today.

While there seems to be a more “native” way of verifying your profile through the app, it was not working for me at the time of writing. So we’ll do it through creating a file in our public folder on our Keybase profile.

Toot screen capture about the verification error from the Keybase app

Create the Verification File in Keybase

First, you want to make sure you have the desktop application installed, as it’ll be much more convenient to do all that. Trust me.