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Comment by mensetmanusman | Hacker News Reader

Not trivial. Slack/teams are built to handle confidential communications with legal oversight.

I don't think the suggestion is for Mastodon to replace internal communication, but to use it as a social media outlet for your organization.

Right. Mastodon doesn’t have an equivalent to Twitter’s (old) verification system. So it’s on users to check if each individual is who they claim.

But if there is an official CNN Mastodon instance, it’s suddenly real easy to see if someone claiming to be a CNN reporter is real or not.

Are they @john.smith@cnn.news? If not they’re a fake.

It would also work for official Microsoft accounts or Colgate-Palmolive or the government.

Seems like a good idea to me. And if you like federation it sounds better than a semi-official instance everyone uses that verifies things, sort of recreating a mini-Twitter “super” instance that is “more equal” than the others.

Can't a domain name, webserver and email address do the same thing? Or am I missing something?

That’s what the instance name (hosted on their domain) provides.

I can put an @microsoft.come email in my profile, but it’s meaningless because it’s not verified.

But if MS has their own instance, then your handle(?) proves you have an account on that instance. And presumably only employees and company accounts would be allowed to have such user accounts.

That's right, and self-hosting on a trusted domain is indeed the recommended form of indicating that an identity is trustable in the Mastodon docs.

Note, however, that Mastodon has a sort-of identity-ish verification system, in that a website link in your profile will be shown with a green check if the website links back to your profile with a `rel=me` attribute.

https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/profile/#verification

Oh neat. Thanks for pointing that out.

Mastodon does have a feature where you can verify you own a website by putting a hidden tag on it that links to your profile.

Sound ripe for confusion and we see this today with domain names and phishing. Are they @john.smith@cnn.com or @john.smith@cnnn.news or @john.smith@cnn.newss.com or @john.smith@cnn.news.hackers.ru?

The fediverse is not about confidential communications though

I'm not sure this is the case.

Like sure, slack / teams can see all your data, but if you have a trivial problem such as being in the EU, you suddenly now have a compliance problem if specific data gets put on the service.

Run mattermost on your own server and many of the problems go away.

Mastodon is a bit different because it's federated, but I assume since it's more akin to a social network, it's similar to running a community support website compliance wise.

the article is from 2022 but it may as well be from 2012. Back about a decade ago there was a huge push in companies toward "employee engagement" and social media was seen as the next big thing. about a bakers dozen companies (trello, atlassian, the usual scumbags) showed up to pitch their version of a sterile, enforced, monitored and legally blessed version of "twitter" for the office. GenZ ignored it, GenX abhorred it, and boomers in the C level posted platitudes and broad, poetic directional sentiments about corporate leadership stuff (or they had their secretaries do it for them.)

check your company intranet. chances are probably great you can find your own 'twitter' clone struggling in an overcommitted vmware instance or chugging along on a second generation Intel pizza box somewhere in a forgotten closet. These things never got patched because the implementation came from the vendor (along with free merch), so theres no local knowledge on how to fix them if they ever break. If you look hard enough, you might even find the add-on "blogging" platform your company got sold when they complained discount twitter for the office wasnt engaging anyone.

Last I checked the current iteration was discount Facebook for corporate, aka. Yammer.

But those things aren't generally for communicating with the outside world, whereas a federated server could network with the wider fediverse.

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