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.
In case anyone needs this, here's a guide to self-verification and a list of troubleshooting tips:
It should be in a thick clear black font throughout. It's definitely not supposed to be light grey?
I try to make the site as accessible as possible for everyone. If there's a problem with readability please let me know.
Just wondering if it renders differently for different people?
@FediThing @dangillmor Oh, and thanks for listening. I see way too many faded grey texts on white backgrounds and I've been thinking it is some kind of cool new graphics designer thing. Now I wonder if it is my browser or something local to my machine.
Except that other friends have complained of this, too, so it is hard to tell what the cause is.
I feel the same way about grey on white (especially thin fonts!), if my site is doing that I'll try to fix it!
@FediThing @dangillmor One more data point -- I've set FF to use an 18pt font (old eyes) and not let the website use its own fonts. Might be something to do w/ that. I'll try in a moment to set that to the default and see if that is the issue.
Thanks for looking! It is really annoying to see an essay you'd like to read and then have to squint at the screen.
I've beefed up the font weight, it should be a lot thicker now. Is that any better at your end?
Fantastic! Thanks so much for bringing this up, hopefully other people now find it easier to read too.
I’ll have a look at the image captions later, they are a bit too small/thin.
Dan Gillmor
FediThing 
cmeier