The external forces are hard at work on centralizing and monopolizing the fediverse. Same thing with fedifinder, these things are trying to ruing what the fediverse could be. People who use services like this want to port over the kudos they’ve garnered on Twitter, they’re literally the people complaining that there’s no blue checkmarks on Mastodon. They’re trying to create the infrastructure to lord over regular users.
No thanks.
Someone like Micah Lee (Who just got banned on Twitter) has been on Mastodon for longer. Not only a journalist but also creator of various open source software like Tor Browser launcher and Onionshare. Besides that, I guess sometimes it can be useful to send a Direct Message to a journalist rather than trying to phone or write them.
I have nothing negative to say about Micah Lee beyond that I’m very critical of the system he’s chosen to partake in. I don’t care how long anybody’s been on Mastodon, what they’re trying to do is create a divide between pleb and power users.
Besides that, I guess sometimes it can be useful to send a Direct Message to a journalist rather than trying to phone or write them.
Yeah, and almost all serious people dissuades people from using Mastodon DM’s. Maybe that’s why Micah Lee have listed both his keybase handle and his Signal phone number as contact info, while we’re free to follow him on Mastodon.
It’s remarkable too, considering that these people could easily, say, link to their profile from whatever website they get published on and immediately establish trust that way. Most people don’t have that influence. Instead, they’re creating a new, larger, more centralized system on top of it to do, what exactly?
It’s the fediverse after all so they can do whatever they want, but it feels like a waste of effort
They’re trying to create the infrastructure to lord over regular users.
It’s not so much that. It’s that journalists are, by their nature, very tied to their reputation for accuracy. Having a system for verification is helpful for the general public to know that the person is at least who they say they are.
Contrast that with a situation that Lemmy has had where a person keeps creating accounts with the display name of one of the admins and posting disgusting porn. I think they finally got bored and went away, but what if that was a larger campaign waged over years? Identity verification provides at least some baseline for trust.
It’s that journalists are, by their nature, very tied to their reputation
They certainly are.
Having a system for verification is helpful for the general public to know that the person is at least who they say they are is useful.
Depends on what metric you evaluate people’s content by, if you want to be seen as Lord Journo the teller of Truf I don’t care if you work at Washington Post or not. I don’t want it.
Contrast that with a situation that Lemmy has had where a person keeps creating accounts with the display name of one of the admins and posting disgusting porn. I think they finally got bored and went away, but what if that was a larger campaign waged over years? Identity verification provides at least some baseline for trust.
That is literally why Mastodon has a built in verification system based on control of the verifying website. If you can tie your account to i.e. CNN and have a green link, it means you’ve got administrative access to the CNN homepage. Which means you are likely working at CNN or CNN have bigger problems than people pretending to be journalists at CNN.
Is the situation you describe because of the state of Lemmy, or that the Lemmy admins are uniquely targeted for impersonation?
Depends on what metric you evaluate people’s content by, if you want to be seen as Lord Journo the teller of Truf I don’t care if you work at Washington Post or not. I don’t want it.
You might not care about that, but many people do. I want to know if someone has fact checkers looking over their shoulder or whether they’re free to pull claims out their ass till the cows come home. That’s not a matter of prestige, but rather one mechanism for establishing a basis for trust.
Is the situation you describe because of the state of Lemmy, or that the Lemmy admins are uniquely targeted for impersonation?
It’s because Lemmy allows setting a display name that shows up almost identically to a local name. If it continues to be a problem, my guess is that will be changed.
You might not care about that, but many people do.
Many people want Lord Journo, the teller of Truf to create an artificial wedge between users? Well then I certainly don’t support them either!
I want to know if someone has fact checkers looking over their shoulder or whether they’re free to pull claims out their ass till the cows come home.
You have no idea how much I’d love that. Unfortunately the last 10 years of media have shown me that this isn’t the case.
but rather one mechanism for establishing a basis for trust.
Yes, it’s disruptive at least - If not destructive to modern society that the trust in media have dropped to what I perceive to be critical levels, particularly in the last decade or two.
It’s because Lemmy allows setting a display name that shows up almost identically to a local name. If it continues to be a problem, my guess is that will be changed.
I think the first step will be to show the username next to the display name, just like on Mastodon. I will continue to assume this lemmy-specific is a non-issue on mastodon.
