I was recently approached by a user claiming to be the developer of Sync for Lemmy who wanted to be a moderator of the community I created, !syncforlemmy.
I was able to verify this user was indeed LJ Dawson as I knew where to contact him on Discord.
It is quite possible that an impostor user on another instance may be created, for example ljdawson@beehaw.org could easily be made.
Should Lemmy have a verified user marker for members who are of importance to any given community? Are there any other options to protect users against nefarious persons playing impostor?
I like mastodon’s solution. That is, validate a public identity, like a site, your site appears on your profile and it’s only verified it you have proof inside the site itself.
On this specific case, the Sync team may have their lemmy users on the Sync site.
Similar to the way nostr does verification: https://www.name.com/blog/how-to-get-nostr-verified-on-a-custom-domain