It was bad enough that we had to tell developers to trust some rando website to download a tool that we'd use to potentially plug in sensitive production usernames + credentials.
And now they've gone and made it worse by posting some new site and confirming the new link is real on their weird "hachyderm" social media post thing. Yeah, talk about a grey-beard get-off-my-lawn developer screaming at the wind and wanting to make it worse for themselves and their "brand".
We're talking in context of Putty which is itself an extremely niche software. But if you think of just the software/tech people - Mastodon is quite an important place.
There's a link on one side and a meta tag on the other. It's as simple as you can make the validation between two sites. It's not even fediverse-specific really - there were other services doing something similar before.
It's because freedom and correctness is hard. Yeah, most people prefer convenience and would rather someone be the source of authority to do it for them, but people on fediverse are not those kind of people.
It means that whoever owns the website marked as verified also owns the social account. See https://joinmastodon.org/verification for a quick overview of how it works.
Sure, but by the time you've verified that, you could also have just visited the PuTTY website (the old/current one) to verify that putty.software is legit.