Impersonation is an instant unfollow for me, even if it’s a test. The best way to deal with it is to not have that person in your follow graph.
Discussion
Good advice. How does this happen?
You can change your username and pfp to anything . Can’t fake nip05 tho
Nip05 is important
I think a couple folks just did it in good fun. It was pretty funny during a ⚡️ war way back when.
But what if there’s a valid impersonation, like a satire account?
Could client apps perhaps store a local hash of name/display_name and profile image for pubkeys they follow, and then detect a duplicate/mismatch?
(I’m glossing over how image hashing/similarity matching could be calculated).
The pubkey with a newer profile update becomes the suspected impersonation, and the app could flag or show UX as less/untrusted awaiting user input.
I think name and profile image are the two major things people read to match identities, since both are displayed in the timeline.
Could even be used in global - “this post pubkey has a imitating name/profile image match to someone you follow.”
UIKit has an image similarity comparator too.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/71615277/image-similarity-in-swift