Bluesky’s launch of a verification system has raised a slew of questions among its user base, from who will be picked — and why — to what outside organizations might be involved and whether the self-verification process will end. TechCrunch has some answers.
After a leak last week, Bluesky officially announced Monday the arrival of its verification system, which is designed to ensure that notable people are who they say they are on the social network. While similar in some respects to the system that Twitter had once used before pivoting to paid verification under Elon Musk, Bluesky’s verification builds on the company’s decentralized ethos by giving other entities the authority to verify users independently.
Bluesky briefly explained how this process worked in a blog post. However, the numerous questions found in the replies to Bluesky’s posts and on other forums, like Reddit, indicate that many don’t fully understand verification.
We’ve rounded up some of the more common questions that seem to be on users’ minds to try to help explain the verification process and its rollout.
While Bluesky didn’t respond to TechCrunch’s requests for comment, we’re referencing the company’s own documentation and its leaders’ posts to try to answer the questions we found many were asking.
Which organizations have been given the ability to verify besides Bluesky itself?
One missing piece of information from Bluesky’s blog post was which organizations outside of Bluesky are being given the tools to verify others. The company explains that “Trusted Verifiers” will be those organizations that Bluesky allows to issue blue checks. However, the only example of this that was shown was The New York Times, which is now allowed to issue checks to its journalists.
What Bluesky hasn’t said is which other organizations now have this power, or how they were chosen.
It’s also unclear if Bluesky has others lined up for early access; the company didn’t reveal any future partners on this effort. This makes Bluesky’s announcement of verification feel somewhat premature, as people want to see the working examples of decentralized verification systems from the get-go, even if it’s initially with only a few testers.
We’ve found that beyond The New York Times, there are only a couple of other organizations that have been given Trusted Verifier status at this time. These include Wired and The Athletic, according to Bluesky software engineer Samuel Newman.
Bluesky itself said it’s only starting out with a “small and non-comprehensive group of accounts.”
