You may have seen people on the Fediverse use symbols like 
or similar.
These are NOT verified users, they are just custom emojis that anyone can put after their names.
Because the Fediverse is decentralised, it doesn't have verification symbols as they require a central authority to award them.
However, if you are on Mastodon and you also have a website, you can verify yourself as the website's owner by using this tip:
@feditips @writefreely We perhaps could do with a second way to validate users, in case of issues with one method.
To address the issue, I think the way @writeas_dev works is to strip out parts of those tags is actually a valid (technical) reason so validation failing is an unintended consequence. But one I understand why. Hence the suggestion of an alternative way to validate.
@zleap
You would probably have to ask @writefreely about that issue, maybe they strip tags out like you say?