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
There is only one instance, which is the company’s, because the company has not released the server software. It’s completely centralized.
Well, then. That sucks
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?
This got me curious, so I started digging into their documentation. It looks like you can currently stand up the appview backend as a local dev environment, but making it actually run as an alternative instance doesn’t appear to be possible (which is why no one is doing it).
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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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.
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.
