Interaction with Mastodon: following & shorter name

I’ve got two, likely related, questions. I’ve set up ActivityPub for my micro.blog (which has a custom domain name). I wanted to follow a couple of people, went to Discover and clicked the search button.

If I enter @simon@simonwillison.net there, it’s not successful in finding Simon’s mastodon instance. @simon@fedi.simonwillison.net does work, however. I think there’s a trick with “.well-known/” files (host-meta, webfinger, nodeinfo) that Simon (and others) have set up on their main sites in order to connect them to their fediverse sites.

So the first question is: is there a way to more fully support that, so that when I see someone say that their fediverse name is @foo@bar, I’ll be able to follow them without having to track down their subdomain name?

And then the second question is: since my micro.blog is on a subdomain, should I be able to set up my own main site to direct fediverse folks over to my subdomain? (That’s probably more a thing for me to try to google than actually a question for you, because I don’t know that micro.blog needs to support anything different for that to work…)

Anyhow, I appreciate how easy it was to get my micro.blog set up and connected to the fediverse!

My microblog is also set up on a subdomain and I simply activated my Mastodon-compatible username here - Micro.blog > Account > ActivityPub. Choose whatever name you want under the custom subdomain you are using at Micro.blog.

Yeah, there’s a subtle difference I’d like to be able to make ideally. Right now, I have to tell people to find me at @kevin@blog.kevindangoor.com and ideally I’d be able to just say @kevin@kevindangoor.com (without the subdomain listed) by doing some additional config on my main website. Truly not that big a deal, though, and I should probably just drop it instead of spending any time trying to make that work :smile:

I am actually wondering the same thing, but haven’t really found any great info on how I might configure this or whether it’s even possible. I know that’s not very helpful, but just know you’re not alone in wondering if this is somehow doable. :slight_smile:

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