Mastodawn

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 #Mastodon #Verification

How do I verify my account on Mastodon and the Fediverse? | Fedi.Tips – An Unofficial Guide to Mastodon and the Fediverse

An unofficial guide to using Mastodon and the Fediverse

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Kristian Jun 15

@FediTips Which is pretty cool but a wholly different kind of "verification" by concept. Not bad, but more about "verifying you're in administrative control of a particular website or domain" rather than "verifying you're the person you claim to be" or "verifying you're a legal representative of an entity you claim to represent". There's a thin line between these I guess.

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Fedi.Tips 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️

@z428eu

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.

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Kristian Jun 15

@FediTips Yes. I also don't think it's completely pointless. But in a way it feels like not actually verifying anything but rather pushing the problem elsewhere. My main gripe here is that ... even though this makes sense, it feels very much built around that rel=me which seems very much like trying to bend a problem to match an actual standard that solves "something". It's not a bad solution, but ... just not a solution to the problem of "have someone /I/ trust verify that persons, institutions, ... are who they claim they are". It seems /much/ more web-of-trust to me than rel=me.