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It seems rather easy to impersonate other users, though. Similar to how one can impersonate domains by being one letter off or something like that.


I'm not sure how battle hardened Mastodon is, obviously they don't have the resources of Twitter or Facebook. Probably easy to DDOS an individual server. However, it might be possible for other nodes to transparently cache updates.

As to spoofing, we've got to move beyond humans memorizing unicode strings or profile pictures as a means of identity validation. Its shambolic enough that twitter users constanly change their display string, obscuring the twitter handle, but even without that problem, how many people send bitcoin/ethereum to @eloon_musk?


People do the same on other platforms. I've been impersonated on a social media platform via a two letter swap.

I don't think it needs a solution, administrators of instances have to solve this, first by asking to offending instance to ban the user, mute the user and if the instance doesn't do anything about repeated abuse, mute the instance.


This will be a problem on any platform that allows users to choose their own names.

IIRC, for quite a while Slack even allowed two people in the same channel to have identical display names.




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