I was recently approached by a user claiming to be the developer of Sync for Lemmy who wanted to be a moderator of the community I created, !syncforlemmy.
I was able to verify this user was indeed LJ Dawson as I knew where to contact him on Discord.
It is quite possible that an impostor user on another instance may be created, for example ljdawson@beehaw.org could easily be made.
Should Lemmy have a verified user marker for members who are of importance to any given community? Are there any other options to protect users against nefarious persons playing impostor?
That is a deficiency in those implementations, not in the platform itself.
Unless the Lemmy devs create their own app, the vast majority of users are going to use third party apps like mlem and Memmy.
So it’s still a problem with the platform if the username databases for instances don’t validate against each other to prevent reuse and impersonation.