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?
Nobody else can have the username Izzy@lemmy.world so that is proof enough that I am me within lemmy. If you have some identity outside of lemmy then that identity should be verified outside of lemmy.
That’s doesn’t mean anything though.
Nobody else can have the username Izzy@lemmy.world but Lemmy.world is only one of hundreds of instances on Lemmy.
I could go right now and make Izzy@<any other Lemmy instance> and depending on the client used, nobody would be able to tell the difference if that client doesn’t list the instance as part of the username. For example, both mlem and Memmy on iOS do not show full usernames by default. You just show up as Izzy to me. So Izzy@lemmy.world and Izzy@lemmy.ml would show as the same user to me.
That is a deficiency in those implementations, not in the platform itself.
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.