If you want to engage with me on here in a pseudonymous way, you’ll have to reach out with your real name first, prove who you are, generate a PGP public key and give to me. Or use any other public account that I know to be you.

So if we want *me* to know it’s *you* and no one else would know it’s you, what we do is I encrypt a message with your public key, and then I send you the encrypted message to your pseudonymous account and you decrypt it (which only you should be able to do), and give me some response indicating you understood the message. Preferably one that makes it clear you understood the message. So then, I will know exactly who you are but nobody else will, and I won’t go insane.

This also works in reverse. If you think an account is me (I don’t currently have any alt accounts, but I suppose it could change.) send the account a message encrypted with my public key and only me (Arctic) will be able to decrypt it. Sign it with your private key, and then I’ll know only you could have sent it.

MY PUBLIC KEY

I do this because I have a stalker who is quite adept at catfishing, and personal experiences with women who tend to pretend ‘this was all a dream’ and think they can act without accountability.