Mastodawn

Dan Gillmor Nov 20, 2023

The self-verification system built into Mastodon should be one of its greatest selling points. This is especially true for journalists and everyone else for whom evidence of identity has huge value in the social media realm.

But anecdotally -- and I would wager for real -- most people in the craft, even a lot of technically adept folks, don't seem to know how easy self-verification can be here.

If you are trying to persuade a journalist you know to join up, please highlight this feature.

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MylesRyden

@dangillmor
It has seemed to me that self validation is not the feature that large organizations should use, but rather setting up their own instance.

Then only people who actually work for say, Newsweek have a Newsweek address. it becomes like a name badge, when the person leaves, they can no longer log into their Newsweek account.

As long as you know the real address base, you know who works there.

For goodness sake, Internet Archive has their own instance.