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 (1 children)

That is a deficiency in those implementations, not in the platform itself.

[–] Earthwormjim91@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Unless the Lemmy devs create their own app, the vast majority of users are going to use third party apps like mlem and Memmy.

So it’s still a problem with the platform if the username databases for instances don’t validate against each other to prevent reuse and impersonation.