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?
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.
There is DID which tries to do some of that. Many methods of registering your identifier have been registered (blockchain, bitcoin, crypto keys, purpose-built software, etc). Linking identities to some entity like this would prove ownership, but getting it implemented in places, encouraging users to use/check it (e.g. almost nobody GPG signs email), not trust similar usernames/domains, etc are all hard problems that having a spec alone doesn’t solve.