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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
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.
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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.
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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.
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