LinkedIn and other popular social sites are offering more options to verify that work for more people in more geographies.

To build trust the Mastodon way, is to avoid surrender of private documents and rely on digital counterparts instead. Mastodon profiles already showcase verified links with a green checkmark because people trust more when they are able to confirm and share more pieces of their identity.

Unfortunately, this task requires technical expertise and the process isn’t easily portable to other Mastodon Instances.

Are you part of a community or running and instance that would be interested in a test of anti-fake profile software?

Does anyone have any stories of fraud or bad actors abusing their community they are willing to share?

  • WinteriscomingXii@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    I’d like to know further the tools you are thinking of regarding resolving this issue. I think is bigger issue is disinformation and misinformation especially with the presidential election coming up and all of the Trump trial stuff.

  • BjorkFan76@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    Is it possible on Mastodon to attest ownership of something like a github account without giving the github account name in the public profile?

    • jessetayler@alien.topOPBEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      That’s a really good point - what we’d like is to be able to leverage the confidence of confirmed GitHub+LinkedIn+Medium blog without the need to always display them. This is one part of the existing confidence system that could be improved - privacy.

  • jessetayler@alien.topOPBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    To sum up community sentiment

    We are content with the “Mastodon way” of verification; however, we have thoughts:

    • Beginner-Friendly: Verify is not “beginner-friendly,” especially for services like blogs and social media.
    • Privacy: We would like to see attested confidence via, say GitHub, LinkedIn, and Medium but without always having to publicly display the account on our profile.
    • Masquerading: We want to prevent individuals from controlling vast numbers of fake profiles for political or non-legitimate purposes.