It was but a mere example

Fair enough.

It could help, but it’s not a problem that any one solution is the solution. There’s going to be some combination of solutions to actually solve it.

Also reasonable

Not really, I might have a lot of accounts, but it’s still only 1 per instance so it’s not really inflating the numbers. Besides most go by monthly active users for gauging the Threadiverse health which because of my pattern I might not even make up 1 MAU lol

Reasonable again.

I don’t just make them, I do my best to actively contribute to them, like I said I also post “organically sourced” content and not just crossposts for this very reason.

I missed that, if that's whats happening i retract my implication.

Um I’m not sure how that would be a user education error? I’m talking about someone maliciously making an imposter account and posting heinous crap “in their name” But there is currently no technical solution on the Threadiverse afaik for it

I think imposter account is a misnomer, two accounts with the same name on different instances are distinct entities afaik,

like mike@gmail.com isn't the same as mike@outlook.com.

if you look at a post and it's written by "mike" and you don't look at the instance it's from you're only getting half of the information you need.

Solutions for this type of problem exist already (PGP keys etc), they just aren't very practical for regular people.

The "could be better solved in a different manner." part was mostly about how the underlying software for the instances might be changed to allow for some of these existing solutions to be integrated more seamlessly.

Or something entirely new, who knows.

Nah crossposts are a solution for a different problem, 4 is for when an instance hasn’t federated with another instances remote comm yet and is therefore unknown to the instance

For example, I made this post to my comm at !gunnerkrigg@lemmy.cafe today from this toast.ooo instance I’m on rn

But toast.ooo never federated with that comm so as far as this instance knew !gunnerkrigg@lemmy.cafe didn’t exist until I manually went to the comm by URL (toast.ooo/c/gunnerkrigg@lemmy.cafe) and subbed to it

Until then nobody on this instance would have been seeing posts from that comm in their c/all/new/whatever feed, even if a post went “viral”. But now they will and for every other comm I sub to as I go

I didn't know this is how it worked, makes sense in that context.