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.
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.
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.
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.