Using Webfinger to create custom Mastodon addresses

If you don't want to run your own Mastodon instance to get a Mastodon account with your domain name, using Webfinger maybe an option for you.

Mastodon uses Webfinger to discover Infos about the user account. This allows you to use a Mastodon account with your own domain (in my case @bjoern@stierand.org) even if you don't run a Mastodon instance in the first place.

Basically what it does is a redirect to your real Mastodon account (@egoexpress@mastodon.social) from a file called webfinger, which is located in the .well-known directory of the website for your domain. To set this up, create the file as shown below and change all references from my Mastodon account to yours.

{
  "subject": "acct:egoexpress@mastodon.social",
  "aliases": [
    "https://mastodon.social/@egoexpress",
    "https://mastodon.social/users/egoexpress"
  ],
  "links": [
    {
      "rel": "http://webfinger.net/rel/profile-page",
      "type": "text/html",
      "href": "https://mastodon.social/@egoexpress"
    },
    {
      "rel": "self",
      "type": "application/activity+json",
      "href": "https://mastodon.social/users/egoexpress"
    },
    {
      "rel": "http://ostatus.org/schema/1.0/subscribe",
      "template": "https://mastodon.social/authorize_interaction?uri={uri}"
    }
  ]
}