I don’t see the problem with this…? Every social media is free to launch their own type of “verification” and their adoption would depend on the user.
I think at this point it’s pretty clear that BlueSky is in the traditional social media business instead of being in the decentralized social media business.
Maybe that’s a good decision for BlueSky, they certainly seem to have the growth at the moment, but I think we probably have to forget the dreams of it ever pushing the decentralization angle again.
I think that’s only because there are few, if any, bluesky instances
If not for the lack of decentralization, they’d be more decentralized.
Funny, but I haven’t heard of anyone starting new instances. Not sure why. Mastodon is more established?
I don’t think anyone can host a relay right now aside from bluesky.
People can host their own data / Personal Data Server, which is somewhere between self-hosting a mastodon instance and creating an account on someone else’s instance. The actual equivalent would be self-hosting your masto account separately from any instance (which is just not a thing with the current state of mastodon nor activity pub).
i love that bluesky just keeps getting away with it like this
“oh well they said people can run their own instances, so that must be true!”
nope, you just can’t run a bluesky instance, can we please recognize this fact and stop giving the massive corporation the benefit of the doubt?Not that I disagree with the spirit of what you’re saying, but bluesky is not even close to a “massive” corporation. According to this they have a net worth of $7.23m, going as low as $600k in October last year. I know of plenty of local restaurants and other small businesses with a higher net worth than that.
There is only one instance, which is the company’s, because the company has not released the server software. It’s completely centralized.
It seems like both the data server (PDS) and the data aggregator (AppView) have been released:
https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds
What am I missing?
Well, then. That sucks
The comparison to 𝕏 doesn’t seem fair:
You can self-verify by setting your domain as your username. We highly encourage official organizations and individuals to do this
Additionally, through our Trusted Verifiers feature, select independent organizations can verify accounts directly.
I don’t see what people’s problem with this is. It’s not like it’s anyone can just buy a blue check (unlike X). It’s just confirming that the account belongs to who it claims to be (like old Twitter verified users). I don’t know if that requires any payment, but it’s definitely not “Here’s $5 – okay, here’s your blue check”.
- During this initial phase, Bluesky is not accepting direct applications for verification," the company said.
- “As this feature stabilizes, we’ll launch a request form for notable and authentic accounts interested in becoming verified or becoming trusted verifiers.”
If I remember correctly, that’s pretty much exactly how old Twitter rolled out its original user verification.
From a de-centralized perspective, I’m not sure how that would work. I guess each instance would be in charge of verification and setting the “verified” flag for the account? The alternative would be some kind of central authority. Granted, I know little of Bluesky (microblogging is not my cup of tea), so I may be way off on my guesses there.
From decentralised perspective the verification data is stored in the verifiers PDS rather than having the verified-certificate in the subjects PDS which means this particular check is always for the official BlueSky server only and won’t be federated anywhere else. Other potential servers are free to implement their own (potentially different!) local verification scheme with it, but it’s never going to be network wide and it never federates anywhere except the server where it’s implemented.
This is why I commented earlier about their decision to move to ”traditional” social networking space and away from decentralised networking
As long as they can’t be bought or paid for, I don’t think it’s a very bad thing.
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Narrator: They could.
Come on Bluesky, try to hold it together long enough to finish taking out Twitter before you go for complete enshittification.
What? I prefer knowing if someone I interact with is genuine. As opposed to Twitter, where I just know they have a recurring monthly payment.
Who runs the verification service? How is that paid for? How do you know the verification service is trustworthy? What happens if they have a blue checkmark and it turns out it’s not accurate?
Big part of it is entirely automated - setting your username to instead of the generic “@bsky.social” to use your own domain registrar will get you a check, as that proves that e.g. the Wendys account would actually be run by Wendys.com.
The other is bluesky manually giving certain (auto-verified?) accounts the ability to verify others. The example given is New York Times being able to verify all their own journalists.
But in both cases it’s different from the way Twitter used to do it (managing a manual database of all verified accounts) or does it now (lol pay $8 for a useless checkmark)
As I heard about it — mostly from people who migrated to mastodon — the “verified” nonsense on old Twitter was the cause of many problems. But I was never there myself, so all I really know is that I’d want no part of it.
perhaps instead use critical thinking to determine genuinity. the alternative is not xitter’s version, and twitters old version was criticized too.
Instead of having some form of verifiable indication, people are just supposed to “think hard”? Have you looked around lately?
The problem only gets worse with AI creeping closer.
Why think hard when you can have somebody think for you?
“Every facet, every department of your mind, is to be programmed by you. And unless you assume your rightful responsibility, and begin to program your own mind, the world will program it for you.” — Jack Kornfield
I don’t have the ability to easily verify users. A user verification service would be great. I think it could work decentralized, but maybe have a separate service for it. Servers independently authenticate, and federate with each other. If one starts authenticating poorly, defederate.
I don’t think it’s a good fit within Lemmy or Mastodon, or … Because I don’t think someone who runs a server wants to bother with it. It needs to be it’s own service that integrates with other services.
critical thinking does not simply mean “think hard”, it means research this person and account for maybe two, even three, seconds, before assuming everything they say is truth.
