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Customize your social media presence

A custom domain name is a great way to claim your identity online - and mastodon usernames work just like email addresses. Whether you want to be [email protected], [email protected] or [email protected], you can show who you are, who you work for, or what you’re into. Your only limit is finding the right domain name.

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Bring your own domain

Although we don’t register domain names for you, we give you all of the info you need to point a domain you have registered to your mastodon.site server. A few minutes is all it takes. What’s more, you can continue to use that domain name for email, a blog, website, online store, or redirects.

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Common domain name choices

The important thing to note is that once set, a mastodon server cannot change domain name. That would break the names of the users and other mastodon servers wouldn’t know where to find them.
The good news is there’s a lot of flexibility in choosing how to use a domain name with your mastodon server. The two main options are:

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Domain is just for mastodon (domain root)

If the mastodon server is the only thing you want to host (you’re not also hosting a website or blog, etc) your mastodon server can run at https://example.com. This is called the domain ‘root’. The users will be [email protected]. If you want to use the domain for email too, that’s no problem. Setting up a mastodon server this way does not affect email functionality.

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Domain also has a site (subdomain)

If the domain already has, or you plan for it to have, a website or blog or something else people will see in a browser, the mastodon server can run at https://social.example.com. In this case, the word ‘social’ is a subdomain. You can use any word here, as long as it’s not hosting something else for your domain. Even with a subdomain mastodon server running at https://mastodon.business.com, the users can still be set at the root - [email protected] or [email protected].
Full step-by-step guides are in our support pages if you need any help.