I wrote about how account verification works on Mastodon for @themarkup.
https://themarkup.org/levelup/2022/12/22/how-we-verified-ourselves-on-mastodon-and-how-you-can-too
@dphiffer @themarkup Great job - that was really well written, Dan.
@danhon @themarkup thank you!
@dphiffer @themarkup @anildash
"In other words, Mastodon makes no claims about who an account belongs to"
I really don't think this is what most people mean by "verification".
Verification of public figures is a valuable feature for readers, so I hope fediverse will give this more attention. A trusted 3rd party to 1) say, "yes, it's they" & 2) proactively do, is possible and good.
* will take $$
** I don't think more homework is the answer
@dphiffer @themarkup @anildash should add, public figures and agencies -- emergency alerts, civic comms, etc
@dphiffer @themarkup @anildash (since I've gone this far)
--> 3rd party verification as a service, structured as public trust foundation, w revenue from content licensing to apps & hosts that choose to pay to include it in their products.
Thanks good people.
@dphiffer @themarkup Props on managing to walk that line between techie and layman. I think you managed to speak to both groups, which ain't easy.
@andrewthelott @themarkup thank you, that's very gratifying to hear!
@dphiffer @themarkup Kudos to @KevinMarks who nudged this into existence on Mastodon! He also created a browser extension which does this for sites beyond Mastodon: https://www.kevinmarks.com/distributed-verify.html
My favorite related implementation is on Huffduffer which takes your personal website URL as an input and parses it to automatically display all your rel="me" links for your "Elsewhere" identity section on their site. Example: https://huffduffer.com/chrisaldrich
@dphiffer @themarkup Smart. It’d be nice if this could be somehow combined with trustworthiness metrics such as the ones computed by Google and the like that are based on age, incoming links, etc.