this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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Technology

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Would digital signatures be a useful feature in lemmy? (lemm.ee)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/technology
13 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

One of the things I'm cautious about when it comes to lemmy (and mastodon) is how easy it can be to lose control of your account.

For example, a server could shut down unexpectedly making hundreds of people lose their accounts. Or, a malicious administrator could take over a popular account to post scams or propaganda. I am not aware of these things having happened, but I don't think they're too far fetched.

Self-hosting a lemmy server solves some of these problems, but that takes a bit of time, effort and money.

I was thinking about email encryption, specifically the digital signature part. Could something like that be used in lemmy? So that if someone decides to "trust" me, they will be able to trust that it's me no matter which account I post from. They would be able to spot an impostor who had gained access to my account.

What do you think?

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[–] StarManta 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Mastadon has a little verified checkmark thing, Lemmy could definitely incorporate it. I believe it requires putting a small file on a server, so it basically verifies “yes, the guy with the account JoeSchmo is in control of joeschmo.com”.

[–] pandarisu 1 points 1 year ago

The Mastodon one just requires you to add a HTML tag to the page you are linking to on your profile. Technically it's a link to your Mastodon profile with a rel attribute, but you can leave the text blank if you don't want a link on the page