Nobody claimed it validates the identity in any way. It validates that the person at the other website confirms it's their social account and the social account matches the other direction. The real identity is not involved here in any way and never was. You're disagreeing with someone nobody here raises.

But the link validation confirms that if you believed that the original download site belongs to the author, then you would have almost the same guarantee about the social account. (+/- the chances of the putty website being hacked)

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closewith 5 days ago | parent [-]

Yes, your caveat at the end there is exactly why this method shouldn't be trusted, as it's indistinguishable from an attacker with access to embed a single link.

So it doesn't confirm the account belongs to the author, it confirms the site has a specific link and nothing more.

	▲	Ukv 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		A regular link won't do, since it requires the rel="me" attribute, which is intended for this purpose: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/... Adding a <meta> tag or creating a page with certain content are already used even for more impactful verification, like getting issued a certificate for that domain. If an attacker does have broad access to edit the HTML of your website, I feel that's already the issue and Mastodon verifying that "this person controls this website" isn't even really wrong.