@darius good write up! Verified links seem like a useful part of the solution but an official work instance seems stronger.

If the point of verification is to confirm that you’re an agent of your employer (eg a journo working for NYT) then it seems fine for that identity to be controlled by that employer?

If you’re a freelancer, then some kind of limited / temporary right to asset that affiliation would seem useful?

Both of these patterns have operated for long time in email.

@darius 100%. It creates verification AND gives other instances the choice to either support or deny that instance on their server.

@darius at core is the idea that we have multiple identities, which seems useful. But perhaps a useful ability would be to assert that 2 identities are the same person, verified bidirectionally, so either party could sever it if something went awry.

A UI that provided a pooled stream of all messages across several identities might also help, but is less of a protocol concern.

@darius re: employee ownership/association of handles and the trouble that causes, I still remember when @nycjim had to rename himself from @nytjim after leaving.

@darius great points! my response is "what about professional orgs, guilds, or unions, like the WGA?"

@darius I hope brands do it though! A turnkey tiny server for just your brand account living on your brands domain name. Would that make sense?

@darius Why not have the employer support rel=me on an employee’s page at the employer website that links back to the employee’s mastodon instance? That would show the employee page link as verified, as long as they worked at that employer. This could also support freelancers who work for multiple employers.

@darius So maybe media organizations either have individual journalists’ pages with HTML `rel="me"` links that the latter can link to, or a single “verified” page with the same. Staff or journalists can then link to that from their profile, and if either side wants to de-affiliate with the other they remove the attribute or the link entirely.

@darius would AP or Reuters creating an instance solve this issue?

@darius This is something I've been thinking about.

It seems that some way to have elevated access across servers would be useful?

For example, my home is Server X, but I have an affiliation with Server Y and can browse its local posts/have some sort of indicator of affiliation.

Please take this with the disclaimer that I've been at this for all of 48 hours and could well have a fundamental misunderstanding of key concepts. :)

@darius

Yes, and a company sponsored #Fediverse server instance might also be akin to a vertical silo too, in the sense that many employers want to own the copyright of anything published with tools or infra belonging to them.

There's no need to do this at all though. Launch your own, say for example, #Soapbox or #Mitra server as a single instance or apply CC-BY -SA (or ND) licenses to your articles.

https://Soapbox.pub

https://Mitra.Social

#tallship #FOSS

⛵

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@darius I think the “personal email” versus “work email” thing is kind of the crux of the matter, though. Right now all of the journalism instances look too much like “personal email addresses where my fursona is journalism” and it would be nice to see at least *some* “work email addresses” show up in the Fediverse, especially for journalists expecting to use the Fediverse *for* work.

Nobody expects the NYT to ask for a quote for tomorrow’s newspaper from cooljournodude12761@hotmail.com