The main suggestion isn’t simply verification of Matrix accounts but being able to use a Matrix account instead of email to sign-up to servers. Also to be able to use Matrix in addition to Email for account recovery. Would be an alternate method of verifying the account, as well as enforcing usage of Matrix usage if Lemmy admins desire that.

The verification of Matrix account ownership isn’t really the primary goal, it’s just a nice side effect. It wouldn’t be in effect though unless the server had one of the first two options checked, if it’s the other two options it wouldn’t need to be verified to be added.

@kariboka@social.harpia.red Might be able to, but that might be a bit complex since XMPP has the same syntax as email (address@domain.tld), the way that Matrix is, it has a different syntax than email (@username:domain.tld) so the sign-up form could detect it differently than email. Which is why the requirement would be Matrix or Email required, not Matrix and Email required. Then you could have one single line in the sign-up form and it would still be familiar to most users.

Maybe one of the forks or backend replacements could implement an option using it to make it compliant. I wouldn’t go with the OP’s solution since privacy is non-existent on Lemmy, but just blocking interaction seems like it would be enough to make it compliant, and prevent the harassment issues mentioned, I made an issue which addresses this in the Lemmy Github, it proposes a new feature rather than changing the existing blocks because it’s good to have mutes and blocks at the same time.

Unfortunately Lemmy isn’t like that and does not follow activitypub spec in that regard, in their current form the block doesn’t seem to do that at all and simply hides the blocked user from the blocking user as if the blocked user didn’t exist. There are no checks on interactions.

Also if you’re wondering how it works with Mastodon, Lemmy basically ignores Mastodon’s blocking system and freely allows interraction with Mastodon accounts in the thread even if they blocked the user replying, and also the community actor.

Yup this happened a lot on Reddit. As much as people complain about the newer two way blocking system on Reddit this type of harassment disappeared basically overnight when that rolled out. It largely was a good thing because for every user who was legitimately being abused by it, there were a lot who were benefiting from it by stopping harassment from others.

Now Lemmy can implement anything but nothing could ever prevent blocked/muted user to create another account in order to continue harassment.

Not a great argument because the same could also apply to community and site bans.

I think that having more tools to fight harassment is ultimately a good thing, are these tools perfect? Of course not, but they are still better than having nothing.

I think the only way to prevent such issue would be a system which would require to prove identity in some way in order to create a single account. But this is completely against the openness of a federated network.

Indeed it is, plus it doesn’t stop those malicious enough to commit a felony just to harass someone but that is neither here nor there, this discussion is about protective measures that can be done before ban evasion.

A good two way blocking system should mainly focus on preventing interaction from the blocked user (The specs of Activitypub mention interraction, as opposed to viewing), even if they don’t hide it, the interactions from the blocked user wouldn’t be federated as if they were a banned user.

I don’t think that blocking people from seeing posts really makes sense since they can just log out to see them, it’s all public. So I don’t really feel like hiding content from them is very useful since they can view it without an account. What is really needed is a way to restrict users from interacting, I made an issue addressing this it would be treated as a kind of profile ban, similar to community bans but for individual users but even when banned people can still view and read, like they always could before.

The simple fact of the matter is, the Fediverse is public. It’s a space specifically built on sharing.

You’re thinking about it wrong, a good blocking system doesn’t need to hide the content but rather block interaction from the offending user, like a softer form of a ban, but only for that specific user. They can still see all content from the user but they just aren’t allowed to interact anymore. Could they bypass it with alt accounts? Yes but they can also bypass bans as well using that same method, so it’s not a good argument against something like that.