One thing that would partially help would, at least, a global video search at peertube.com. With channel names you have a problem, as they would not be unique, BUT at least, you could return all users in all instances, and hope people check the avatar. That would make the process more transparent to users, as they would go to peertube.com and see everyone they follow.

BUT, there's a huge problem. When you have a big creator on the platform, like PewDiePie for example. Every instance would have someone creating a fake PewDiePie. So, either the original creator would go to another platform, or they would need to use bots to create they users on all possible instances. So... creator will not have any incentive on using Peertube, as there's no 100% way to know who's the original.

Sounds like a keys.pub integration is necessary for cryptographic identity attestation and verification, since Keybase was acquired by Zoom.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22995792

Unless all of this is completely transparent to the viewers and content creators, not gonna help.

Remember when Mastodon started, the fake IDs were already a problem: https://mashable.com/2017/04/06/you-cant-delete-your-mastodo...

Agree entirely. I would donate to Keys.pub and PeerTube to ratchet up the UX and make it transparent.

You shouldn’t need Youtube, Twitter, or some other centralized provider to attest to your identity; you should be able to, with centralized providers only announcing or caching that attestation (just as keybase provided for with proofs). Maybe there’s an easy way to tie this together with FIDO, U2F, etc. I need to do more research.

https://fidoalliance.org/how-fido-works/

Maybe some kind of centralized lookup? Oh wait...

And how do you handle all the @pewdiepie@someotherinstance? The original creator has to create an account on all instances to avoid fakes, or give up on the platform?

In a P2P model, there's multiple ways of going about this.

But I tend to think that a true web of trust model makes the most sense. There may be 250 pewdiepie's on the network, but I'll just follow the one that (1) is closest in my network (followed by my friends) and (2) has the most follows (AKA highest trust).

We already follow this logic of #1 and #2 today even on centralized networks. Web of trust just makes sense to people intuitively.

Who do I know that already knows you? How else can I determine that you're legit? I'm gonna snoop your profile and see what looks legit. Ah, looks like a lot of normal people follow you already.

Of course this isn't full proof. But it's not full proof on centralized networks either. We just need reasonable certainty.

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