this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2024
-19 points (39.6% liked)

Fediverse

28739 readers
127 users here now

A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!

Rules

Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Because let's say you're Tom Hanks. And you get [email protected]

Well, what's stopping someone else from adopting [email protected]?

And some platforms minimize the text size of platform, or hide it entirely. So you just might see TomHanks, and think it's him. But it's actually a 7 year old Chinese boy with a broken leg in Arizona.

Because anyone can grab the same name, on a different platform.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (2 children)

If your email address is [email protected], what prevents someone to create [email protected] and pretend to be you?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

If it was widely known that outlook was the legitimate suffix, there's no need to worry about this. If SAG-AFTRA had their own instance then any actor's account username associated with it would carry the suffix chosen by SAG-AFTRA.

[email protected] for example.

[email protected] would be instantly recognizable as illegitimate.

This problem already exists in many different forms and is already managed well by the fact that celebrities' real usernames are well known and bullshit posts from accounts trying to fake them are easily caught just by looking at the user name. There are plenty of parody accounts on X with very similar username formats. Is that a major problem for X users? Not from what I've seen.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

A difference between kbin (and mbin?) vs lemmy (and pyfedi) - the former would show the entire name, including instance. If instance was not included, it was because it was local (so you could assume '@kbin.social')

On lemmy/pyfedi the name shows up alone - though you can hover over and see the instance name. But at a glance I can see how someone could get confused. Not the best UX IMHO.