Much more than a bluetick

Lots of people have been migrating to mastodon since the changes over at twitter and there has been a lot of debate about bluetick in twitter.

People who migrated to mastodon might be asking themselves, is there a bluetick equivalent in mastodon or twitter users who doesn't wanna pay a fortune for a simple verification. Well there is an open source alternative, much more then a bluetick, it’s not just for mastodon or twitter but for many other platforms, it's called Keyoxide.

What is Keyoxide ? I'm gonna quote the Keyoxide here:

A modern, secure and privacy-friendly platform to establish your decentralized online identity

Keyoxide allows you to prove “ownership” of accounts on websites, domain names, IM, etc., regardless of your username.

That last part is important: you could, for example, be ‘alice’ on Lobste.rs, but ‘@alice24’ on Twitter. And if your website is ‘thatcoder.tld’, how are people supposed to know that all that online property is yours?

Of course, one could opt for full anonymity! In which case, keep these properties as separated as possible. But if you’d like these properties to be linked and, by doing so, establish an online identity, you’ll need a clever solution.

Enter Keyoxide.

When you visit someone’s Keyoxide profile and see a green tick next to an account on some website, it was proven beyond doubt that the same person who set up this profile also holds that account.

Photo by Franck on Unsplash

Keyoxide is in active development and currently on it’s second round funding by NLnet for Keyoxide v2. Awesome dev behind all this is Yarmo Mackenbach who is a FOSS dev.

The identity theft is becoming more of a problem everyday and Keyoxide is a great way to verify accounts and prove they belong to the same person. Let’s say you are in HR department of a company interviewing for a software engineering position and you require the git portfolios of the canditates you are interviewing to determine if the person has the needed tech stack and experience. How would you prove the git account you are given really belongs to the person who you are interviewing ?

Or let’s say a friend has a twitter account with the handle @JohnDoe and you want to know if the same handle on mastodon belongs to the same person so you can add him. It has many use cases, you can also just claim your accounts and use it as your personal business card or website. Here is Yarmo's Keyoxide profile as an example for you to check out. Over a year ago I started developing a mobile app for Keyoxide, where you can save your own profile for quick access, enter an identifier or scan a qr-code to see the verification result generated by the app. It currently is available on F-Droid and codeberg releases for Android but a release on App Store for iOS and on Play Store for Android planned along with a bunch of other features.

For more information, check out the Keyoxide website and the Keyoxide docs.