Custom Domains Guide

So you want to point a custom domain at takahe.social? Great! Before you start, you need to understand a few things:

• Custom domains are limited to only our Featured Supporter Patreon Tier or higher, those who donate an equivalent monthly amount via direct invoice, or for open-source project or charities (email contact@jointakahe.org for information about those options).

• Once you make accounts (identities) on your custom domain, you will not be able to move them away from takahe.social until we implement the move feature in the future. Even then, your posts will not follow you, only your followers.

• Custom domains are not separate servers - you will still be on the same “server” as everyone else, see everyone else in the Local feeds, use our global set of server emoji, and be subject to our moderation policies and rules. This will change a little in future as we implement more domain separation and give you the option to be slightly more isolated.

If you’re alright with that, then let’s discuss how to set up your domain.

There’s two ways you can route a domain to us:

• Pointing the whole domain at takahe.social. This is the easiest way, but it means you will not be able to use that domain for anything else (for example, if you want @user@sub.domain.tld to be your handle, you must point the entirely of sub.domain.tld at us and nothing else can exist on it).

• Routing users from a main domain to a Takahē-specific subdomain. This is generally preferred, as it lets you have @user@domain.tld work, while still serving a different website on domain.tld. Takahē will serve requests from a subdomain like takahe.domain.tld.

Please understand that once you have selected one of these options it cannot be changed without you losing all your follows. Unless you are very sure what you are doing, we suggest using a Takahē-specific subdomain.

You will be able to log into Takahē using the same credentials either at takahe.social or under your custom domain; it will work the same either way.

Whole Domain

To point a whole domain at us, you need to add a DNS CNAME from that domain to takahe.social.

If you are trying to point an apex domain that does not support CNAMEs, you can make an A record that points to our IP address of 104.198.180.195. This IP may change as we get our network setup fully stabilised; we will try and let you know via email when this is going to happen.

Note that no subdomains of the domain you provide will work, not even www, as we will only issue an SSL certificate for the exact one you provide.

Takahē-Specific Subdomain

To point a subdomain at us, you will need to add a DNS CNAME for it to takahe.social.

If you then want account handles to work off of your main domain, you will need to proxy through these URLs from that main domain to the subdomain:

• /.well-known/webfinger
• /.well-known/host-meta
• /.well-known/nodeinfo