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.
Truthiness of a user should be determined with corroboration on 3rd party services.
Except no one will. If millions of people were on the fediverse, maybe 1% would confirm.
We live in a world where people read the headline and believe it, but don’t even open the article.
Then it doesn’t matter.
But it would.
Imagine Kamala Harris as president had a mastodon account. And somebody else made a duplicate Kamala Harris account. And this duplicate announced that the United States has gone to war with Russia.
Except these media stations don’t know how the fediverse works. They don’t know what an instance is. They just see Kamala Harris on social media announcing war.
And in media you HAVE to be the first to break the news story. So now you have every major news outlet confirming nuclear war, and the nation is panicing.
Meanwhile, Harris is trying to figure out how this all started. And this whole thing maybe lasts 10-60 minutes before somebody notices the mistake. Then it takes time to correct themselves and calm everybody down.
All over something that isn’t happening. All because people don’t check sources.
Now this is an extreme example, but I could see it happening if the fediverse was bigger, under it’s current setup.
Or, all accounts in the fedi are anonymous by nature, and if they need to be verified, they are verified on 3rd party sources.
Except they won’t.
Then return to the first clause.
Then people won’t sign up for it.
The fediverse as it stands right now is confusing enough as it is for new people. Now you’re saying you want to add in the chaos that comes from everybody being annonomous? They say that the internet, and trolling, and threats of violence are encouraged online because you’re annonomous. And now you want to highlight that feature on a service thats hard enough to grasp without nazis and death threats.
Who cares? Like, none of this matters. Don’t put the fedivwrse on a pedestal
Nothing here is verified internally, and shouldn’t be. Centralization is antithetical to the decentralized nature of the fediverse.