So an idea that has been floating around for some time is that you can verify that a link a person puts in their profile belongs to them, by checking if the linked site links back to the profile (with a special attribute that signifies intention), and that it can be used to, indirectly, verify that a profile is "real"
I wonder what the UX for that would look like. I doubt this can or even should be something displayed in-stream like the Twitter verified badge, because with custom emojis, the display name area is absolutely untrustworthy. More than that, the presence of a verified link is meaningless unless you trust the linked site (such as someone's official personal homepage)
So it would probably be something only displayed next to those links.
Okay I didn't mention what the "special attribute" was because I didn't want to alienate the non-dev audience, but I'm getting a lot of suggestions for complicated things, so yeah, I meant microformats rel="me", it's the simplest thing, why would you even bother with TXT records or public keys
