@NervousGamedev the problem is that just providing a link is very hard to verify. For example, if all I needed was a simple linkback I could comment on a NYTimes news article with a URL to my Mastodon profile, and link the NYTimes article and be "verified". There are fixes for that but they are tricky and there are many holes in it. The reason why we check for a "rel=me" HTML attribute is that writing unfiltered HTML is typically not allowed by commenting systems