Lemmy

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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to !meta@lemmy.ml.

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How can federated networks protect their users from impostor accounts? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by itsmikeyd@lemmy.ml to c/lemmy@lemmy.ml

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I was recently approached by a user claiming to be the developer of Sync for Lemmy who wanted to be a moderator of the community I created, !syncforlemmy.

I was able to verify this user was indeed LJ Dawson as I knew where to contact him on Discord.

It is quite possible that an impostor user on another instance may be created, for example ljdawson@beehaw.org could easily be made.

Should Lemmy have a verified user marker for members who are of importance to any given community? Are there any other options to protect users against nefarious persons playing impostor?

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[–] SheeEttin@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

No.

Let's say you trust billg@microsoft.com. Anyone can already create billg@scam-site.cn. You wouldn't trust that, why would you trust any other account you can't authenticate?

Like most impersonation questions, the answer is to verify identity through a known trusted source, as you did.