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Would digital signatures be a useful feature in lemmy? (lemm.ee)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/technology

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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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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

then we still would need a place to host verified user keys - like we currently need for GPG/PGP
or am I missing something?

but I still kinda like the idea to further secure my account and maybe have the ability to authenticate over instances

[–] Impronoucabl 0 points 2 years ago

If your lemmy server itself acted as a host for all the keys, I think it could work. As long as you're not worried about the NSA/Well-eqipped-company slipping in to steal your online persona.

I.e you never mention anything personal about yourself, etc.