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?
No, everyone is equal here and I want to keep it that way. I don’t want this to be twitter.
You mean besides the one where you just successfully figured out the person was legit through verifying them?
No, it should be up to the community mods to verify someone is legit not the app itself.
I respect your position, but I think that as federated services gain popularity, the percentage of users who have the nous to validate any person decreases. Additionally, I can’t image users being happy about answering large numbers of validation messages.