General Discussion

"Should Tribe have to monitor every social media site for imposters?"

That's something all public or authority figures already have to do, continually. It's been the case since the first spoofed email nearly a half-century ago. He could solve the problem by doing what so many others do: create an account on the other platform & post it in a location that's easy to access. That way anyone who reads him knows how to verify it's him.


Regarding, "...and Mastodon is open-source, so it's a ripe target for hackers."

A few thoughts from experts on the matter:

Regarding open source software (OSS), it's not necessarily more secure, but security-wise it has a lot going for it, especially with larger projects.
1. Many more eyes are looking to find and fix problems.
2. Open source projects fix vulnerabilities and release patches and new versions a lot faster.
3. Practically all commercial software uses a not-insignificant portion of open source

"Without the source code it is impossible to see what a program does. So open source software is seen as more secure as it is the only kind of software that can be checked for security at all without needing to blindly trust someone"

(note: This is why I run OSS on my home routers, servers & some clients. Most commercial, non-OSS ones send too much encrypted data back to their servers. In some cases it's been discovered they're sending back info about traffic they handle such as URLs visited. I feel sharing my family's internet usage was not included in the purchase price.)

"Open source is not automatically more secure than closed source. The difference is with open source code you can verify for yourself (or pay someone to verify for you) whether the code is secure. With closed source programs you need to take it on faith that a piece of code works properly, open source allows the code to be tested and verified to work properly."