Lemmy

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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

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How can federated networks protect their users from impostor accounts? (lemmy.ml)

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

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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 [email protected] 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?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

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.