Bluesky an' clear: the social media app that will definitely last forever

The Stephen King account says: "There is an impersonation warning on my account, but it’s really me. Just hasn’t been used lately." (The warning reads: The moderators believe this account is lying about their identity.)

They're gonna need some sort of verification system if they ever want public figures to join in real numbers.

yeah seems like theyre going for a pretty bare bones approach so far which is prob wise, theyve only raised $8m so far from what i can tell, staffing up stuff like verification moderation celebrity concierge service etc will be expensive and prob comes later

verification is already implemented in the way they plan to do it, https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/4-28-2023-domain-handle-tutorial

Sounds like a big lift.

also it doesnt prevent anyone from impersonating you

(I guess I see how the "newsroom" thing would work, for organizations that would take the time to do that – but yeah, I don't understand why I couldn't buy a domain and say I'm "Tom Cruise" or whoever.)

Bluesky is not going to affirmatively verify anyone which is complicated and expensive. They rely on domain control for that. But they are actively flagging accounts as impersonation which is cheap. They would flag @iamtomcruise.com quickly based on current behavior.

Sounds like a big lift.

― Girl (1956) (morrisp), Wednesday, November 1, 2023 5:09 PM (twenty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

So was getting verified at Twitter?

Getting a blue check in 2022 involved sending Twitter photo id and making/receiving phone calls and physical mail. No celebrity is going to send photo id to a shitty startup.

Well I guess it will have to wait until they're no longer a shitty startup(?)

It'd take little effort for a domain registrar to give you a little walkthrough or one-click "set up my bluesky identity" option. And if, for example, the nytimes wanted to verify reporters they could set up a reportername.bsky.nytimes.com relatively trivially, too.

Most orgs are going to have a domain, and if someone enterprising wanted to do a verification service specifically for bluesky, you could make a "verified.user" domain or whatever company that could give tomcruise.verified.user or w/e and it'd be on them to be reputable

who is the hypothetical person who wants to be verified but has no resources?

I'm a little testy because I have been annoyed by the complete junky mess that federated identity became that left us with "log in with google, facebook, or apple" as opposed to what it could have been

seems liked itd be better to just not start a social media site

It's not about having no resources. If Stephen King didn't bother to do it (assuming that's really him), why would any other random celeb / public figure who's mildly interested in signing up, but not enough to bother with the domain thing? Maybe I'm wrong, but relying on "crowd reporting" plus some moderator oversight to identify potential impersonations feels unsustainable.

FWIW, I've seen ppl complaining about verification issues on other sites, I know that this problem isn't unique to Bluesky (or easy to deal with).

Huh that domain as verification which piggybacks on the verification that was done there is cool. Not as good as my idea which is to use use your social sec no. as your handle, i mean so much verification.

Not everyone is an American with a social sec no.

Says he, completely missing the joke, argh.

I admit I also don't really understand how the domain thing verifies anything other than the fact you own or control a domain.

It verifies you are the same entity as owner of the domain. This is only useful if people trust that the owner of nytimes.com is The New York Times.

Right, and if you don't have a storied website at a domain (or plan on building one)...?

"storied" is a bit strong. just needs to be a website that people who know who A is also believe belongs to A. A doesn't need to be famous.

(i said x but had to change it because that was confusing. fuck that guy.)

Having to build & host a website which convincingly establishes your identity is not only a very 1998 idea of being online, but it surely a greater lift for verification than whatever Twitter required for all those blue checks…

it kind of unclear exactly what theyre going for, you cant see posts unless youre logged in, thats not a twitter replacement, twitter is all about blasting posts out to everywhere put them on tv in the newspaper etc

i don't think there are many people who would have "deserved" verification in the ~2022 blue check sense (i.e. celebrities, journalists, businesses)
who do not have their own website or work for someone who does.

i get that it's not perfect, but i can't think of anything better, and twitter 2022/instagram's approach is not viable for a startup.

you cant see posts unless youre logged in

this is admittedly very weird. it's not even true in any technical sense. it's just a limitation of how they've built they're first party front end. there are a bunch of places you can go to see a given user's feed if you know their username.

yeah its weird all posts are available on the skychain

the way to do verification is achieve scale by allowing jokers to impersonate celebs then you have enough money to hire people to kick the jokers off

When T2 launched (which is truly a janky startup), they were doing it via scheduling a Zoom call with one of the founders, where you wave your ID in front of the camera (for like $5). And ppl were doing it! Then they switched to some 3rd-party verification service. I can get why, like, Paul Rudd wouldn't want to do that; but I would think a writer may prefer it, over having their verification tied to their current employer? Idk

By the way (so as not to end the night on a down note) – I've been using a custom feed which I built via blueskyfeeds.com. It's easy, and a nice way to pull together posts using your favorite keywords, if you're so inclined.

(The bummer is that you still see Bad Posts, and now they're Bad Posts using your favorite keywords, so... they may seem extra bad.)

yeah i think the "journalist that changes jobs" situation is not clear under this verification model. i'm not sure if you can change usernames yet.

I think people impersonating people who are known mostly for being posters is a bigger threat than people impersonating celebrities unless you’re counting scams.

Anyone with a presence in media or something like a CEO is pretty easy to verify by going to their job’s website and seeing if the handle linked there matches the one on social media

if you think lebron james wants you to enter your social security number and credit card number to send you bitcoin you probably have bigger issues

what if he has 10 macbooks to sell

that could be a deal

It definitely makes sense for something like a brand, a gov’t agency, etc.

i really dislike the .bskysocial at the end of every handle. it’s one of the lamest ugliest and most “mastodon energy” things about the site. and i don’t want to register a domain to be at the end of my handle, i just want nothing. as long as they keep the invite-only system, if they just ban people for impersonating, shouldn’t be too much of a problem since it would be costly to get back in each time. so those two design features seem complementary

it is exactly like mastodon because the intention is to allow posts to be federated and they’re hoping multiple providers pop up and join the network

I do see accounts with other suffixes, so I guess ppl are setting up their own AT Protocol servers?

IIUC those are just people using custom domain names as handles. Federation is not turned on yet.

suspect that all this federation protocols etc is just gonna end up a largely pointless hassle, most people dont care they just wanna post, bluesky doesnt even have dms gdamn

xp Ah, thanks... I wasn't sure what was happening there.

TBH, I'm not even totally clear of the value of federation in the ActivityPub "fediverse." From what I understood, getting two servers to talk to each other (whether they're running the same software or not – Mastodon or any of the others) is all dependent on whether the folks running the server you're on decide to flip the switch... and you could switch servers, but... It just feels highly speculative in terms of future benefit, for something that folks in that world are so focused on.

Yeah there’s a tension right now because bsky is pretty close to what people want, but their roadmap is to turn it into one part of a system that no one except tpot libertarians, blockchain people and other cranks want.

I do like how the AT Protocol allows you to bring your posts & followers with you if you switch servers; that def seems like an improvement over how ActivityPub works (not that I really understand why folks on Mastodon go around switching servers all the time...).

I think federation is overall good but no one has done it in a way that people like with twitter-like social media. That and the fact that people don’t really think of things as service providers, they think of them as platforms.

I ostensibly have an email account that my internet service provider has given me, but I never use that. I use mostly gmail outside of work, because it’s convenient and I shrug off the monetization aspect. But I at least recognize that email is an open protocol and I could jump providers at any time.

The pedant in me finally stopped cringing due to my associating things this way. “Do you have a facebook?” always bugged me because you have a facebook account or facebook page. Your entire presence there isn’t yours at all, and it’s not portable.

If I have, say, a wordpress.com site I can export the entire thing and host it elsewhere with no one being the wiser as long as I’m not using a bunch of obvious proprietary junk. So you have a website.

I know phone numbers are passé for nearly all messaging but even those are portable. I’m not asking someone for their Verizon.

Sorry, felt like shouting into the void

I've been "enjoying" (more or less) using three different platforms, for different purposes. When I post, I mostly post different stuff on each one, and in a different "voice" (not in a performative way; more in the sense that the vibe & features of each platform sort of mold how I post there). Occasionally I'll post the same thing to a few of them, just to see what happens. (Nothing much, in my case...)

bsky-social-qzync-tysnp

they are testing federation now for whatever reason and whatever good that will do