Angry, disappointed users react to Bluesky's upcoming blue check mark verification system

I feel like domain usernames are still inherently susceptible to phishing, you can get a typo or similar character to try and trick someone that your username is an official one

The problem with domains is that regular people would need to know what a domain is and what verified ownership says about the account in question.

Even then, reading domains is quite difficult, even for people who know about the topic: Humans are Bad at URLs and Fonts Don’t Matter

I saw some small talk about it, and it really just boiled down to domain verification is great for more tech savvy folks, but trying to get larger accounts (think politicians, celebrities, etc) is a lot harder. Having a visual check, using tools within the app or site, is a lot easier.

And personally I like the idea of verification checks as long as it remains a simple means to do just that: verify the owner of the account. Morons like Musk and his ilk always thought it was a clout thing, and for a small minority that was probably the case, but by and large before he ruined it, it was great.

If they are, and there isn't anything to display it, how are we to know what's been vetted and what's slipped through the cracks? Especially on a new account?

domain names do that for people with well known domain names, and verification processes do that for people without

Far from perfect, but I think it's good to have a layer that very visibly shows 'yes, this is the account you want'.

Domains are a worthwhile addition, but they run into almost the same problem as usernames and handles. Can be made misleading easily - sure, I could often go to the web address and verify it (if they don't put up a convincing fake site), but that's much lower visibilty.

Eg, you can probably register nintendo@nintendoamerico.com or similar and get it by some folks just as easily as registering the Twitter handle. There's a payment step to get the domain, but that's about it.

The centralization problem you mention is a good point though. It was a fine system, if you felt like you could trust Twitter as a verifier. Today obviously, one could not. But Bsky seems to at least theoretically have a 'choose your verification provider' idea in mind, which would (again theoretically) resolve a lot of that issue.

you can host your own PDS, but everyone is still using the same appview

The biggest thing is that you need to be manually authorized by them for federation. They will only ever federate with servers that arent serious enough competition to lead to democratization of the overall network.

my mom has always told me that I had the potential to work at NASA. but the requirements are prohibitively high

Last heard (a few months ago) the cost is in storage. The protocol isn’t too complicated now, but it generates a shit ton of data, and IIRC you need a minimum of 3 copies.

It's 100% centralized, but with the ability to be decentralized. Sorta like Threads before they started federating

This is a little bit more black and white compared with the other responses. 🙈

He’s already sold Twitter/X to xAI; he’s got his arse covered when the bottom eventually falls out.

Yeah for the masses they will likely always flock to commercialized easy to use social media that reaches critical mass the fastest, so them being willing to move and keep moving is best we can hope for. For rest of us stuff like fediverse will be there to use.

Bluesky already has domain based verification which solves that perfectly, I guess people just don't want to use it.

Oh yeah, they are literally everywhere. And a lot of them are impersonating people that haven't switched from Twitter yet to take advantage of it specifically.

It's what Twitter had and most people on blueksy just want Twitter before Elon. It sucks but that is really what the majority of people even want. They don't care about the decentralized stuff.

I think having both is nice

I didn’t sound like a centralized system from the article. More like they want a third party like Verisign or something.

Something will have to be done as these platforms become more popular to cut down on fraud and disinformation. You don’t want people impersonating other people or organizations, or companies. Even if Bluesky starts federating to other platforms, just knowing that they have a blue sky blue check would be an improvement if you could display that check on other clients like mastodon posts.

ICANN has already made a mess of domain names so I don’t know if relying on the domain is enough. People are using non-Roman characters to trick people into thinking a website domain is the real thing. Others are buying up all these random domains so you get things like medicare.net and medicare.org and medicare.com etc etc.

I dunno what the answer is. Just rambling out loud in frustration.