Russ

@sheenaghpugh@mastodon.scot Sorry for the headache! The gist of it is this: Your Mastodon profile is @sheenaghpugh@mastodon.scot If *I* wanted to put a link to your profile on *my* website, the HTML for that would look like: Sheenagh But if *you* wanted to link to your own profile and say "yup, that's me!", you'd add rel="me" (get it? me?) to that HTML tag: Sheenagh That way, your profile and website vouch for each other.

(Looking at you, @pflag@c.im)

@pflag@c.im Oh no! Rest is super important for avoiding long COVID, so I hope I didn't come across as overly impatient. I'm just doing my best to have your back by weeding out impersonators. BTW, if you post a link to your Mastodon profile from your Twitter account (as a tweet, from your profile, etc.), it helps twice: 1) more folks from there find you over here 2) it's good enough proof until Twitter crashes. 💪

@VincentTunru@fosstodon.org This is a legitimate concern. I've got a few ideas about how to address it that would require some infrastructure work. One thing we can do that doesn't require any infra work is this: if we are suspicious that an instance is verifying bogus links, we can open up the linked website ourselves, look for the rel=me link, and report the fraudulent account + instance (and probably cross-post to FediBlock). It's not good enough, but it's a start.

@jasonsanford@wandering.shop I don't know if there's a perfect option for reporting potential bad actors. For provable fakes, "Report" them to alert your and their admins. For uncertain cases, it's less clear. I've considered the possibility of setting up something equivalent to #FediBlock , but it's not quite the same situation. Big picture, I want to establish two norms: 1) organizations verify their links 2) the community notices breaches of #1 and (politely) pushes for them to be fixed.

@KekunPlazas@mamot.fr @voxpelli@mastodon.social Yeah, @TexasObserver@texasobserver.social did this, and I think it's great. There are three reasons I didn't issue this as a blanket recommendation, though: 1) It does involve both some effort and money on an ongoing basis; it's not fire-and-forget. 2) There's also a non-zero chance of an incorrectly-configured or undermaintained instance getting pwned. 3) Some folks use the same account for personal and work stuff, and I don't want my boss to be able to lock me out of my account.

@Wolfie_Rankin@aus.social The good news is that if you don't have a website, then you don't need to prove that your Mastodon profile belongs to the same person as your website, so you're good. If there's something other than a website that you'd like to prove is yours - Twitter account, LinkedIn profile, Google Scholar profile, etc. - then that might be trickier.

@steelman@mstdn.io @KekunPlazas@mamot.fr @voxpelli@mastodon.social @TexasObserver@texasobserver.social It's not necessarily obvious, but having an instance running on the TexasObserver.com domain is substantially stronger evidence than a verified link from the website. That said, it wouldn't hurt!

@ErichSchulz@aus.social Perhaps it'll be possible in the near future, though. Let's keep our eyes peeled.

@ariaflame@masto.ai I took a quick look at your dreamwidth page, and it looks like you've got it set up correctly. Not sure how long it'll be until Mastodon catches up. One thing you might want to try is removing the link to dreamwidth from your Mastodon profile and then adding it again - that might speed things up.

@sheenaghpugh@mastodon.scot I don't believe so, no.

@sheenaghpugh@mastodon.scot @drjacannon@c.im Yeah, I concur.

@lambda@meow.social That's a fascinating question, and I'm not sure off the top of my head. It looks like this is the relevant code, but I'm not up to date on my Ruby: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/blob/main/app/models/account/field.rb