I'm not sure I totally understand the relationship between the servers. I made an account on both mastodon and octodon. So they're totally separate servers, but stuff shows up cross-server too in the federated timeline?
It seems to me that there's potential for impersonation here--grab someone's username on a different server, and.... yikes.
@Asbruckman This is also true of email, though. I could setup asbruckman@hotmail.com and pretend to be you.
@Asbruckman I think for emails we rely on either pre-existing relationships, where we actually tell someone our emails address, or the organisational credibility of the server. So, when I got a gmail address, I set up a mail forward and replied to people's messages from my new address, so they knew it was me. And when I got a new job, most people assume businesses only give employee emails to employees. However, here, most Mastodon servers are public....
@Asbruckman Mastodon instances are random collections of people. And there's no forwarding/redirect mechanism as in email, since microblogs are public. therefore our only mechanism to assert our identity is by telling people via other means. So on email, on twitter, ect. But an assertion here, on mastodon, doesn't carry any particular weight.
...Which is a long way of saying that you're right.
@celesteh good point... I somehow think this is worse, but maybe I'm imagining it