Idea: Mastodon should allow adding rel=me links to Mastodon profiles to allow an account to verify other accounts.

Idea: Mastodon should allow adding rel=me links to Mastodon profiles to allow an account to verify other accounts.

(Or maybe a specific rel=trust?)

This can be used to create a web of trust.

e.g., For Gaza Verified, we have verified about ~250 accounts so far using video interviews. But that sort of verification doesn’t scale. And if we trust these accounts to be people from Gaza, we should trust them to verify people they know from Gaza. So Gaza Verified and the 200+ verified accounts become a trust root.

If they could then add rel=me links to their profiles to say “I verify this account is by a Palestinian from Gaza” (which is all we do), then we would start creating a decentralised web of trust.

Thoughts, @staff @haubles and #mastodon and #fediverse in general?

#webOfTrust #federated #decentralised #verification #GazaVerified

@aral @staff @haubles
Why Not Building a Website?
With „Profiles“ and rel me links for persona you are trusting - and them people from Gaza could your rel me links from the Website.

@michaelmarek @staff @haubles We already have that: https://gaza-verified.org

This is to decentralise the verification.

@michaelmarek @staff @haubles (I can build that functionality there by allowing verified members to add verified members. I just don’t think that’s where it belongs. It would be far more useful if it was a feature of Mastodon itself and it could be used for other webs of trust also. Perhaps with attentions as to what the trust or verification relationship entail.)

@aral @staff @haubles
Ah. Okay. Didn‘t recognise this.

@michaelmarek @staff @haubles No worries

@aral @staff @haubles

Decades ago there was an idea similar to this called:

Trust Networks

There was even an early social-media that implemented a Trust Network named:

Advogato

Advogato

(web.archive.org)

Advogato - Wikipedia

(en.wikipedia.org)

#Advogato #TrustNetworks

@aral @staff @haubles

This is an excellent idea.

@aral @staff @haubles In the IndieWeb space, there's a "vouch" extension for avoiding WebMention spam: https://indieweb.org/Vouch

I think the concept can be extended to a link rel=vouch maybe? The idea is like this:

- You are A.
- A trusts C in some capacity, so C's webmentions go through.
- A has no trust relation with B, so B's webmentions default to being denied until A establishes that B is trusted.
- B can show that C vouches for B, and if A trusts C, then maybe A can trust B too.

@aral @staff @haubles But with that said: I think Mastodon has a much more similar feature already, with featured accounts And with the upcoming v4.6 release, they plan to roll out what they call "Collections" as another iteration of the idea. There's an implicit notion of trust in deciding to feature an account on your own profile, which could be enough -- an explicit relation may not be necessary after all, although it could still be helpful.

@aral@mastodon.ar.al @staff@mastodon.social @haubles@hachyderm.io similar ideas have been already proposed.

• Decentralized verification with publicly available evidence (even though the specific proposed implementation here didn't provide a big value above the rel="me" way IMHO)

• Decentralized verification with per-instance approvals (but in this case the proposal was to actually make verification more granular)

The idea that has flying in my mind for a while is that of using profile fields as a mean of verification.

If I add a profile field with title "Partner" to @x@y.z, and @x@y.z also adds a profile field with title "Partner", then the relationship would be marked as verified.

This would be similar to how verification for family members or partners works on e.g. Facebook.

My main use-case was actually that of multiple accounts for the same person - e.g. if I have my main Akkoma account and a Madblog account, I'd like to be able to link them to each other so they appear verified on both ends.

The main limit would however be the low number of custom profile fields allowed on the vanilla Mastodon implementation.

This can work well with partners or parents, since usually a person doesn't have that many of them, but less well with cases like gaza-verified where an account in Gaza may want to verify 10 more people.

I think that this requires a more thoughtful protocol-level implementation - @evan@cosocial.ca ideas?

@fabio I've wondered about a pinned post with a specific first line (like "trust" or "verify" or "connection") with a new handle on each line, which if verified gets a or . This could be implemented client-side even without a formal server-side implementation but obviously worse than structured data.
#Keyoxide uses a vanilla post on the profile to verify links from GPG keys, this is essentially a bi-directional idea of the same concept.

@aral@mastodon.ar.al @evan@cosocial.ca also, in the specific case of #GazaVerified, since the users already have an account on the website, how about creating a form for them to allow them verify other handles? (Of course, with extra human vetting at least at the beginning to prevent abuse)

Then insert those handles in the db and display them with a rel="me" on the website.

It's still a workaround, and I'd still like the idea of a proper protocol solution for peer-to-peer verification, but in the meantime it could work.