rel-me

short URL

http://ufs.cc/w/relme

XFN 1.1 introduced the "me" rel value which is used to indicate profile equivalence and for identity-consolidation.

example

rel="me" is used on hyperlinks from one page about a person to other pages about that same person.

For example, Tantek's home page has (markup simplified)

<a href="https://github.com/tantek" rel="me">@t</a>

And his GitHub profile itself has (markup simplified)

<a href="https://tantek.com/" rel="me">https://tantek.com/</a>

Thus establishing a bi-directional rel-me link and confirming that the two URLs represent the same person.

Publishers can use the XFN creator form to create rel-me hyperlinks.

screencast and videos

Watch some short videos:

• David Recordon's excellent *30 second* explanation of XFN rel="me"
  • Archived page, though presentation requires Flash. (original: http://www.sixapart.com/static_news/opening_social_graph/xfn_links/xfn_links.html)
• Brad Fitzpatrick explains rel="me" and more XFN.
• Joseph Smarr's whiteboard explanation of rel="me" as implemented in the Plaxo online identity aggregator. (archived)

Longer:

• Gavin Bell on "What is your provenance?" (40 minutes) - provides a much broader discussion of the problem statement of who is a person on the Web, and starting at about 0:07:30 explains how hCard + rel="me" helps solve this problem.

tutorials

A simple data portability project or is it (archived) rel=me summary by Bob Ngu

domain verification

rel=me is the standard way to check that a website belongs to a user on a 3rd party site.

• read a user's website that they entered into their 3rd party site profile
• check for a rel=me hyperlink from their website to their 3rd party site profile
• if such a rel=me hyperlink is found, then the user has proven that they control that personal website sufficient to put a link back to their 3rd party site profile, and thus domain verification succeeds.

If you're the implementer of such a 3rd party site with user profiles, implement the above to implement a personal website domain verification feature.

rel-me-auth

RelMeAuth is a proposed open standard for using rel-me links to profiles on OAuth supporting services to authenticate via either those profiles or your own site.

In short it is a combination of domain verification as documented above, and OAuth authorization on the 3rd party site that the user's domain links to.

Read more about how to implement RelMeAuth and web sign-in.

implementations

Notable Sites:

• Mastodon uses rel-me to support "verified" site links in a green box with a green checkmark next to the verified site.
• GitHub
• Wikipedia via MediaWiki Extension RealMe
• Threads announced rel-me support 2023-08-09 [1]
• ...

Services:

• IndieLogin is perhaps the most comprehensive rel-me implementation, using it to implement RelMeAuth and a superset of web-sign-in that is focused on independent websites.

WordPress plugins:

• Social Links Wordpress plugin - supports rel-me links to other services
• About Me plugin (on github) - supports creation of an About Me page with rel-me links to other profiles.

past implementations

• Google used reciprocal rel=me links for domain verification, which it also used for independent site rel-author support.
• App.net implemented rel-me for officially connecting your domain to your app.net account, as well as publishing rel-me on your site.

advocacy

Advocating rel=me support can be done a few ways, if a site has:

• user profiles but no "website" field - ask them to add a "website" field and mark it up with rel=me.
• a "website" field on profiles - ask it to support publishing rel=me
• a notion of "verification" or "verified" profiles - ask it to do so via confirming reciprocal rel=me
• login/sign-in - ask it to support RelMeAuth with a Web sign-in user interface.

Current requests:

• Liberapay: Associate accounts with websites #1034: rel="me" link - requested 2019-02-08 by https://github.com/Changaco
• ...

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TO BE UPDATED

The sections below this need to be updated (e.g. links verified, and deadlinks replaced with Internet Archive versions)

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examples in the wild

Examples of sites publishing rel=me support, e.g. on user profiles.

See:

• services supporting XFN rel=me

articles

• 2018-04-26 Martijn van der Ven: The Real Deal About rel="me"

see also

• https://indieweb.org/rel-me
• services that support rel="me"
• rel-me-faq
• xfn
• rel
• social network portability
• XFN 1.1 profile