The rapidly growing social networking startup Bluesky, a Twitter/X alternative built on open web principles, revealed in a livestream on Monday how its approach to user account verification will differ from existing services, like Meta and X. While traditional social media has shifted to a pay-for-verification model, where users pay for the privilege of the blue check that confirms their identity, Bluesky envisions a system where multiple verification providers exist to serve the needs of its broader community.
Currently, the only way to verify your account on Bluesky is to adopt a custom domain name, something the company began offering an option last year. That’s how you know that the account @nytimes.com on Bluesky belongs to the real The New York Times publication, for example. In addition, Bluesky tackles impersonation issues directly, as they arise.
However, Bluesky believes that custom domains may only be part of the solution around verification going forward.
In the future, the company is considering a model where multiple verification providers co-exist.
Explained Bluesky CEO Jay Graber, “…we could be a verification provider — and we might at some point (and also, no, I’m not sure when). But it would be something where you’re accessing through one app, and then there might be another app and there might be other services,” she continued. “And they can choose to trust us — the Bluesky team’s verification — or they could do their own. Or other people could do their own.”
Or, in other words, Bluesky is proposing a verification system where one entity — the company itself, that is — is not in singular control over who gets the “verified” label and who does not.
This is a rethinking of verification compared with how such systems have traditionally worked and how they have more recently evolved.
On Twitter, verification has been fraught with complications and concerns over the years. Originally, Twitter would verify some high-profile users but ignore others who believed they deserved verification, too, creating a two-tier class system of sorts.
Under new owner Elon Musk, the company attempted to overhaul this system to make it more democratic by allowing anyone to pay to verify themselves. But, as you may expect, this dramatic switch did not go well, as users bought verification checks in order to impersonate others on the platform, causing chaos.
Even today, X continues to have a problem with bots that are verified, which has devalued what a verified check means.
Meta, meanwhile, followed Twitter/X with paid verification that serves mainly to assist creators and businesses on its platform.
