A brief thread on what will probably become the first pinch point as Mastodon grows and more "important people" start to use it. It won't be harassment (though there will be that too).
Rather, it will be authentication. But there are ways to solve this problem that are true to the Fediverse spirit. /1 #commodon
Yesterday I saw that @taylorlorenz joined Mastodon; the first "big name" journalist that I've seen doing so. Sooner or later, there will be other "Taylor Lorenz" accounts that pop up here.
Indeed, there is one already that describes her as a "writer for the Atlantic" and is several years old.
How to know if someone on this system is really them? If you have been around enough, you know that this was Twitter's original problem. Indeed ... /2 #commdon
... for instance, you may wonder why "Donald Trump" was always "realdonaldtrump" ... well, the answer is that there were a bunch of other "Donald Trumps" wandering around.
Eventually, Twitter instituted the "blue check mark" which, before it became all the weird things Elon Musk wants to turn it into, was simply an authentication badge that said you were really who you said you were. /3 #commodon
Well, on here, there's no way to do that! No central authority exists to make that call. So, what do to?
The answer: decentralized instances set up by organizations. /4 #commodon
For instance: I know that the European Commission on Mastodon is really the European Commission. How do I know this? Well, because they have their own Instance run on their own server.
And every news organization, university, and company could do this too.
Think of it like email: you know that if a journalist emails you from "The New York Times" it is really them if they have an NYT address. /5 #commodon
And this has a big additional benefit: usage policies and required online behavior could be enforced by the organization itself through its' own instance!
No more of this public struggle between employees about what they can or can't do on social media! I mean, fights about behavior still could become public, but in the end it could all be run in house.
And you could have a civilian profile, and a company profile too. /6 #commodon
Addendum: @danhon wrote an about this idea earlier, and in better detail than I did. See it here:
https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s13e17-a-proposal-for-news-organization-mastodon/
Chanders
Dan Hon