I mean, pretending to be someone in another instance, “stealing” the username, is trivial. I see the more likely targets being instance admins or high profile users. Should we worry somewhat about this?
I mean, pretending to be someone in another instance, “stealing” the username, is trivial. I see the more likely targets being instance admins or high profile users. Should we worry somewhat about this?
It’s a bit of a problem, indeed. Here’s a practical example of that:
In this example, I’m writing from a lemmy.ml account, but the display name impersonates another account in another instance (beehaw.org). Anyone could do this with someone else’s account.
Based on that, I think that:
And for us, users: never rely on the display name. If the identity of someone is contextually relevant, always check the actual username, not the display name.