As just one example, if a famous person makes an account, and then a spammer makes an identically-named account, just on another instance, then the famous person’s followers could get confused.
Tbf, you can basically do this now - throwback to the start of paying for Twitter verification…
On Mastodon, the simple answer is you use the verification to prove it’s you by using rel=me links.
It’s not perfect, as you’d expect, but in an age where everything is suspect anyway…
On bluesky/atproto, your handle is a hostname and is only recognized valid if you control that hostname. Basically the same as rel=me except it’s a .well-known file instead of a html tag
Thank you for explaining about the relationship=me links.
Email ofc is the same - e.g. BillGates@google.123 just maybe might perhaps not be the same person as BillGates@microsoft.com. Nevertheless, Bluesky makes this stuff trivially easy, as too does Reddit, by virtue of centralization.
So the task would come down to convincing people to prefer more effort on their part vs. less effort somewhere else - while also at the same time doing this on top of all the other criticisms as well (none of my friends are there, there’s barely any content, trying to find stuff is so very hard, why do the developers fight amongst themselves leading to an abysmally slow rate of improvements, and basically why should I care about this anymore then, if others likewise can’t be bothered to care either?). And the vast majority of people are going to choose the latter over the former.
It’s not even necessarily a bad thing, so much as it simply is, and we must make peace with it, or expend effort to overcome it ourselves, bc that’s just how the law of entropy works.
How does reddit implement this? Afaik famous peoples accounts were known only by reputation and if they posted some form of image verification publicly, but there wasnt any identity verification going on on reddits end. Thats how it used to be everywhere, and how it probably should still be. If you saw an account claiming to be someone, you didn’t believe it was actually them unless you could check it out and verify their identity in some way.
Should or shouldn’t doesn’t matter. The majority wants an account that doesn’t require external verification.
Ignore the fact that that’s not truly possible. People will go to whatever platform makes them feel it’s true the best.
Being capable of effectively convincing people your platform will provide this is a baseline requirement to even start having this discussion. The anonymous Internet isn’t something most people want
People want “anonymous for me, not for thee” mixed with “I don’t trust you, trust me bro”.
Starting from a basis that people want a contradiction, people will go to whichever platform “cons” them better.
Facebook had a real name policy, then it didn’t. Twitter had an anonymous policy, then it added verified accounts, now anyone can buy the blue, so they added a gold.
Meanwhile, people don’t want to understand that others can behave in different ways or capacities at different times, but if course want full understanding for themselves.
Goggle’s Circles had the right idea, but it failed explosively by showing their hand to people who want to pretend it doesn’t exist.
Tbf, you can basically do this now - throwback to the start of paying for Twitter verification…
On Mastodon, the simple answer is you use the verification to prove it’s you by using rel=me links.
It’s not perfect, as you’d expect, but in an age where everything is suspect anyway…
On bluesky/atproto, your handle is a hostname and is only recognized valid if you control that hostname. Basically the same as rel=me except it’s a .well-known file instead of a html tag
You can be anything. Any company. Any person. Any organization. On any platform. Anything.
Thank you for explaining about the relationship=me links.
Email ofc is the same - e.g. BillGates@google.123 just maybe might perhaps not be the same person as BillGates@microsoft.com. Nevertheless, Bluesky makes this stuff trivially easy, as too does Reddit, by virtue of centralization.
So the task would come down to convincing people to prefer more effort on their part vs. less effort somewhere else - while also at the same time doing this on top of all the other criticisms as well (none of my friends are there, there’s barely any content, trying to find stuff is so very hard, why do the developers fight amongst themselves leading to an abysmally slow rate of improvements, and basically why should I care about this anymore then, if others likewise can’t be bothered to care either?). And the vast majority of people are going to choose the latter over the former.
It’s not even necessarily a bad thing, so much as it simply is, and we must make peace with it, or expend effort to overcome it ourselves, bc that’s just how the law of entropy works.
How does reddit implement this? Afaik famous peoples accounts were known only by reputation and if they posted some form of image verification publicly, but there wasnt any identity verification going on on reddits end. Thats how it used to be everywhere, and how it probably should still be. If you saw an account claiming to be someone, you didn’t believe it was actually them unless you could check it out and verify their identity in some way.
Should or shouldn’t doesn’t matter. The majority wants an account that doesn’t require external verification.
Ignore the fact that that’s not truly possible. People will go to whatever platform makes them feel it’s true the best.
Being capable of effectively convincing people your platform will provide this is a baseline requirement to even start having this discussion. The anonymous Internet isn’t something most people want
People want “anonymous for me, not for thee” mixed with “I don’t trust you, trust me bro”.
Starting from a basis that people want a contradiction, people will go to whichever platform “cons” them better.
Facebook had a real name policy, then it didn’t. Twitter had an anonymous policy, then it added verified accounts, now anyone can buy the blue, so they added a gold.
Meanwhile, people don’t want to understand that others can behave in different ways or capacities at different times, but if course want full understanding for themselves.
Goggle’s Circles had the right idea, but it failed explosively by showing their hand to people who want to pretend it doesn’t exist.