Create a standard to verify user identity on another platforms

Booteille commented 5 years ago

PeerTube is growing. More and more YouTube users are subscribing to a PeerTube instance to mirror their channel. But since PeerTube is a new service, a lot of users change their name and some the name of their channels. We can't rely just on the title of a channel or on the name of an user to verify if it's the same user on PeerTube and on YouTube.

Here is my proposal: Create some of standard for content creators, allowing them to verify their identity on PeerTube by adding a link or a token on their YouTube description (on user's description and/or channel's description). Then, PeerTube, maybe through an option, would be able to verify the presence of this link/token on the YouTube description and validate or no the identity of the user.

I can already see two usages of this:

The first concerning immediatly PeerTube: Automatic mirroring of identified users channels. Once the user is identified, YouTube channels and videos would automatically be added on PeerTube.

The second concerning PeerTubeify, a compagnon extension allowing you to automatically redirect to your favorite PeerTube instance if a video you try to access on YouTube is found on PeerTube: Redirection of users pages and channels to their PeerTube version.

What do you think? If you think this is a good idea, how would you implement this?

ghost commented 5 years ago

Thank you @Booteille for creating this issue.

Maybe we should create this standard, not only for channels, but also for individual videos.

I investigated a bit about what users can write on YouTube:

The description of a channel can only contain plain text; there is no markup of any kind, and links are not recognized.
Below the description, a user can add links, with a mandatory custom title (30 chars max).
The description of a video consists of plain text, but links are recognized and made clickable (there is a youtube redirection though), and shortened to 40 chars max (37 + 3 dots) — timestamps are recognized as well, but we don't really care about that.

Peertubeify: https://gitlab.com/Ealhad/peertubeify

rigelk commented 5 years ago

If links are not recognised (which allows to use rel=me, we could have the user insert in a description some text signed with the user's private key.

Booteille commented 5 years ago

Hi! I am bumping this thread. I think your idea is good, rigelk. Does someone else has opinions on this topic?

Chocobozzz / PeerTube

Create a standard to verify user identity on another platforms #1414