I think the thing that makes sense here, assuming Mastodon actually becomes a popular thing, is for companies and other institutions to run their own servers and limit accounts to their employees or members. E.g. nytimes or wapo or national review or whatever could run their own servers for their journalists. NBA and NFL for their players. SAG-AFTRA for actors and TV personalities, etc.<p>I know that there's a kind of verification mechanism already in Mastodon where you put a backlink in your website and then you get a badge. But it is an order of magnitude more complicated than "this server vouches for the identity of this account," and website ownership isn't really identity anyway.
Wow the comments here are very bitter. What do people have against people wanting to be verified for who they really are? For press this is important, so you know you're talking to the right person.<p>Was always surprised there was no independent website/source for this (Hey, my name is X, my details are at example.com/1234 if you want to find how to contact me).
God, what would I do without my status quo parrots?<p>Has any of these "journalists" have ever done any journalism, like investigating political officials, exposing corruption scandals, even if at a local level, you don't need a global story.
Seems like this is run by one well-meaning person on off hours. I wonder if this sort of multi-domain "verification" be automated similar to ACME protocol. Let's say you are a bonafide reporter at the Daily Globe (or any social media entity with any org). The reporter goes to presscheck, makes an assertion, receives a token, places the token in a known location on Daily Globe's website, presscheck watches for token and once it is present issues "verification" to reporter. Maybe Daily Globe has to keep the token in place for the verification to stick or maybe there is a re-verification at a certain interval.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Certificate_Management_Environment" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Certificate_Manageme...</a><p><pre><code> Who is eligible?
Any journalist globally, including freelancers, newsletter writers... any category, really. This site is about confirming someone is who they say they are, not defining what a "journalist" is.
How are profiles verified?
Applications are to be made here. The quickest way to get verified is by tweeting a link to your Mastodon profile on an already-verified Twitter account. Failing that, providing a company email address for us to follow up with is another great method. Freelancers and newsletter writers should include as much background information and linked worked as possible in their application.</code></pre>
Keyoxide and similar are a great way to establish and verify identity across a variety of platforms, and are open to more than just journalists.<p><a href="https://keyoxide.org/" rel="nofollow">https://keyoxide.org/</a>
I made a similar thing for finding people to follow but covering all different kinds of interests and topics: <a href="https://getstarted.social/" rel="nofollow">https://getstarted.social/</a>
I clicked randomly on one of the "latest additions" (<a href="https://www.presscheck.org/journalists/lauren-wolfe" rel="nofollow">https://www.presscheck.org/journalists/lauren-wolfe</a>) and ...<p>Well, the linked mastodon profile (<a href="https://mastodon.world/LaurenWolfe" rel="nofollow">https://mastodon.world/LaurenWolfe</a>) doesn't even exist.
This seems pathetic, like a bunch of twitter addicted journalists who've walked away from twitter but can't give up their addiction to being special on twitter.<p>The twitter check was never a mark of credibility. Most of Fox News had twitter checks.