Moving even further away from decentralization
Twitter speed run.
Aaaand the whole circus starts once again!
Isn’t owning the domain proof enough already?
Nobody else could possibly use max-p.me as their handle, and proving control of the domain is plenty for security sensitive things like LetsEncrypt.
Anyone you’d care to mark verified already brought their own domain.
Copying a comment from Reddit:
Yeah. This is good. E.g. an account claims to be a NYTimes journo, it can then be verified by the NYTimes account. Or an account claims to be an NBA player, that gets verified by the NBA / team account. And each of those verifications will show who granted it.
Contrary to the predictable FUD in this thread, it decentralizes control. Makes it meritocratic - i.e. you earn the privilege to issue verification by proving to be a known and credible source.
This neither centralizes nor decentralizes. It’s exactly just as centralized as before (which, as they are one company, is total).
Whether Bluesky issues a checkmark, or whether Bluesky tells someone else that they are trusted (by Bluesky), and thus can also issue them, Bluesky is the one who is in control of checkmarks.
Unless Bsky sets up some kind of decentralized council that they don’t control to manage this list, it’s just a form of deputization , and deputies are all subordinate to the ‘sheriff’.
Grants of revocable authority are not decentralization.
I like the idea, but then who gets to decide who is and isn’t a credible source? Is it only intra-account verifying? Can anyone verify anyone else, or do you need to be authorized by bluesky to start verifying others?
Isn’t owning the domain proof enough already?
It’s open to abuse and exploitation the same way domains are in general. An enterprising faker could register a domain that looks legit, but isn’t.
And centralization solves this how? The other social networks are giving more checkmarks to grifters and scammers than they are giving them to honest people because, spoiler alert, con artists are very good at both building a following and paying bribes.
I think their plan is for it to be like how website cert verification works. You have a set of trusted authorities that issue certs (or in this case verifications) and that can revoke them if needed.
set of trusted authorities
Sounds like centralization to me. Who decides whether to vest authority in this group? Who selects the members of this group?
Unless there is some method for each host/ user to nominate members and it changes dynamically based on total votes at any given time, you’ve just permanently entrenched centralized authority in your (supposedly moving to) ‘decentralized’ app.
I expect the trusted authorities would be selected by the server where the user account resides. I.e. if a server’s admin does not recognize a certain authority, it would not show their verifications to users logged in to their server.
It’s possible that it could extend to user selections of trusted verifiers as well, but I think implementing that level of granularity would be more of pain than it’s worth to Bluesky. Still, I could be surprised.
That’s not what the current PR lays out, and I’m not going to give them preemptive credit for future maybes. Right now they’re just X v2.
Once they actually release the server software for self-hosting, i.e. once the app is actually at all even a little decentralized, and not just selling themselves on a feature that doesn’t exist, we can see how much decentralization the trusted reviewers have.
Automation can verify that realdomain.com has much higher traffic/status/web-presence/google-ranking than raeldomain.com
Yeah that’s a pretty good point. As a technical user that seems solid but for the average user that makes sense.
