this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023

30 points (96.9% liked)

Fediverse

27819 readers

769 users here now

A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!

Rules

Posts must be on topic.
Be respectful of others.
Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.

Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

30

What's to prevent someone from hijacking my username? (self.fediverse)

submitted 1 year ago by YourHuckleberry to c/fediverse

25 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Since usernames are only unique to the instance it's created on, what's to stop someone from creating a copycat username in order to impersonate another user?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] AeroBlue 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I mean depending on how you look at it. Usernames are really your name + instance, and that is unique. To know you are actually talking to the right person you just have to make sure that matches up

[–] nitefox 1 points 1 year ago

The username is structured as username@instanceurl so they will know it's you based on the instance url