I was recently approached by a user claiming to be the developer of Sync for Lemmy who wanted to be a moderator of the community I created, !syncforlemmy.
I was able to verify this user was indeed LJ Dawson as I knew where to contact him on Discord.
It is quite possible that an impostor user on another instance may be created, for example ljdawson@beehaw.org could easily be made.
Should Lemmy have a verified user marker for members who are of importance to any given community? Are there any other options to protect users against nefarious persons playing impostor?
Should Lemmy have a verified user marker for members who are of importance to any given community?>
No, everyone is equal here and I want to keep it that way. I don’t want this to be twitter.
Are there any other options to protect users against nefarious persons playing impostor?>
You mean besides the one where you just successfully figured out the person was legit through verifying them?
No, it should be up to the community mods to verify someone is legit not the app itself.
My initial thoughts on lemmy where that it was so strange we where going BACK to the trust everyone’s servers and separate accounts model like that of Email.
Given its distributed nature there is nothing to protect against just setting up random squatter instances to quickly phish users with similar domains.
It also means if you setup on a small instance that later goes away you sort of lose part of your identity.
Some form of block chain distributed ledger that runs on the instances seems like it would address “SOME” of the issues.
Any of the instances could add you to the account ledger you could have a singular unique name, and the ledger could record which instance created you and what verification has ever been done to your account. You could then directly sign in to ANY instance as that account provided you had the credentials that matched the chain entry.
Verification providers could exist that SIGN your block chain entry with some form of validation and users and instances could chose which ones are recognized. This would be a way to add verification for those what WANT to be public not anonymous. All of which is optional.
The ledger could also track if any instances are known to be untrustworthy maybe and other instances could vote not to trust accounts generated by them.
If you have even just a bit of fame… you more than likely have a website that show all the way to contact you… so this is a non-issue.
Example, me: https://thefrenchghosty.me/contact/
I like mastodon’s solution. That is, validate a public identity, like a site, your site appears on your profile and it’s only verified it you have proof inside the site itself.
On this specific case, the Sync team may have their lemmy users on the Sync site.
No.
Let’s say you trust billg@microsoft.com. Anyone can already create billg@scam-site.cn. You wouldn’t trust that, why would you trust any other account you can’t authenticate?
Like most impersonation questions, the answer is to verify identity through a known trusted source, as you did.
A verified user marker? Maybe, like, a blue checkmark?
