I saw the creator of #fedified say "well you can just buy any old domain name and pretend to be whatever org you want" and like... Uh you can check that against a Google search easily. There's no way to know that I can trust whoever is running #fedified or to verify THEIR claims

@darius yeah felt very much like “let me appoint myself as s central authority for a technology that I don’t understand”.

@darius There is literally no way of proving who I am without this. Not multiple years of post and interaction history, not my single-user instance with my name in the username and domain name, nothing.

@darius Totally agree. I participated in that list when it first launched because I thought it was just going to be a list people checked when trying to find people they followed on twitter. I have no interest in them turning that into being an "authority" based on rel=me links to their own list.

@darius So personally I tend to look at my project websites as something my *social media profiles point to*, rather than something that *drives traffic to my social media profile*. I have *never* linked my social media from my professional websites, because my websites are my professional face and my social media are where I talk about dicks and tits and such. I include my project websites on my resume and I don't want an employer seeing my (personal) social media.

@darius Getting verified should be: my account is hosted at the domain that gives me legitimacy.

@darius My understanding (from the person who created it) is that it is only meant as a temporary thing, to help people who were following journalists on the birdsite know that they were following the same journalist here on Mastodon. But you're right; it's a human-powered project which must be very time-consuming, and since we can verify ourselves in other ways, I wonder how many people actually do use it.

@darius another thing that works: Big organizations that might _need_ verification, like parties, should simply run their own server from their own domain. I know if an account is on social.bund.de that it is a legitimate german government account

@darius And for the "buying an old domain" thing: If you really need "deeper" validation, get an Extended Validation SSL certificate. At 20 bucks per month it pays at the third blue tick. And it shows available technology chains nicely.

@darius It would be good if there were other methods than rel=me for sites where you don't have access to the HTML, especially other social media sites. Perhaps something like a plain link to your Mastodon profile with ?rel=me appended could have the same effect?

@darius Anyone can just link their profile in their twitter profile anyways

@darius Actually, it is not really a hack, but a darn great idea. You go where you feel safe and wanted - your instance. Then you can reach out in the #Fediverse to follow who you do trust. You can easily block users or entire instances should it be necessary. You get used to it.

@darius I thought about a democratic vouching system but I’m not skilled enough to write it. (Each voucher could also be vouched for within the system)

@darius 100% agreed

I asked #SquareSpace support to add an easy way to insert rel=me on their hosted sites (they support custom headers if you have premium service, but not the regular service). If lots of folks make similar requests, support should come. It's a trivial feature to add.

of course, lots of web hosting services already have the hooks

@darius I think the problem you run into is non-techie people trying to onboard themselves but do not have the time or desire to build a whole website to give that verification meaning. What we need is a way for Mastodon's verification system to allow people to verify by putting their link somewhere on their other social media profile(s).