Mastodon has an account verification system, but it works differently to most social networks. There is no central authority confirming people's identity, instead there is a self-service system based on ownership of websites or web pages. You can find out more at:
➡️ https://fedi.tips/how-do-i-verify-my-account
For example, the official account for LibreOffice is @libreoffice and we know it is official because their profile page's link to https://www.libreoffice.org is green.
@FediTips This is very useful!
Another indirect verification would be the domain of an instance. If there is an accout of bbc (for example) with the "bbc.com" domain,you know its them.
And that applies for fediversal software that don't have a built-in verification system!
Yup, that's another way of doing it 👍
For example the European Union has many official accounts such as @EUCommission in the "europa.eu" domain which is their official website.
Yup, I think it also works if you set your website to be IPv4 and IPv6?
I take your point, but it's difficult to think of a scenario where an official website would verify an account that doesn't belong to them? 🙂
On the other hand, a major weak point is that not everyone has a website, and not every website is well known as being official. 😦
The original idea of the rel=me standard was to verify accounts from different social networks, but unfortunately Meta, Twitter, Google etc refused to use open standards. This left just the Fedi and websites.
This verification system works using a general standard called "rel=me", which wasn't originally designed for just websites.
The original idea was you could just mention your accounts from other platforms and it would verify you were the same person in those accounts on that other platform.
Mastodon obeys the standard but unfortunately Google, Meta/Facebook, Twitter etc refuse to use the standard, so the only way to use it was having your own website and a Mastodon account.
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