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 Since we are both on octodon.social, it shows just the first part of your username (and mine). Any other server will include the rest of the name, much like an email address - for instance, to someone on Mastodon.Social I am golero@octodon.social. As long as you keep this in mind, you can check which instance each user is from.
@Asbruckman Nothing really, but a similar thing happens on Twitter with people making handles like @realdonaldtrunnp and the same pictures as his real account, just as an example. It's up to the reader to verify they authenticity of the account, or at least hold a little skepticism.
I do wonder if there will be a way to verify accounts on the instances, though, because I can see your point.
@golero I got that. but what's to stop me from taking @golero on another server and deliberately impersonating you?