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@[alasdair@terminal_IV ~]$ No chance. You'll never be able to search the whole #Fediverse, and I mean the whole Fediverse, like all the way into the most remote corners, for anything. Not posts, not names, not even hashtags.

Let's assume I set up my own Hubzilla hub again. I start it for the first time. My admin channel does not have any connections. It has ActivityPub deactivated. It is the only channel on the hub.

5 minutes later, I create a second channel, using your user name. It is the second channel on the hub. I still leave ActivityPub deactivated. The channel will never have any connections.

If you want to be able to search the whole Fediverse for impostors, you ought to find this channel. You ought to find it even a split-second after I've created it. Even though it doesn't have any connections. Even though it even has ActivityPub off, so most of the Fediverse couldn't possibly connect to it.

This is absolutely impossible.

For this to work, you'd need a Fediverse-wide search feature that doesn't work with crawlers, but with mandatory automatic submission of what could possibly be searched to everything that offers search by all instances of all projects.

This, in turn, would either require the mandatory support of a centralised search feature which large parts of the Fediverse have very good reasons to reject, or my hub would submit the creation of this channel to 20,000++ Fediverse instances immediately after creation.

The latter, in turn, would require my 5-minute-old Hubzilla hub to know every last Fediverse instance. If someone spun up a brand-new FoundKey instance for the first time 30 seconds before the creation of this channel, my hub would have to know about that FoundKey instance.

For one, this is technologically absolutely impossible. Besides, such a feature doesn't currently exist. And since it won't make sense, it will never exist.

Also, it's interesting how I seem to be the only one out of 11,000,000+ Fediverse users who knows anything about the Fediverse beyond Mastodon.

You can't! Just like on Twitter and other social media.

This is the internet :)

That's not specifically an issue for the Fediverse but your entire online life. You may consider a service like Keyoxide.

Edit for an addition: I just noticed that this doesn't answer the question. Keyoxide helps to protect against impersonation, not how to find out whether that already happens. I don't know of an easy way to do that, though. You'd probably need to do a lot of research across the web I guess?