Bluesky, the upstart, decentralized social networks, which has offered an island with blue calm to those who depart the swelling, dark waters in X (formerly Twitter), finally introduces an official form of accounting. It will look familiar to those who spent time on old-school Twitter, but it contains a few notable warnings.
Until today (April 22, 2025), there was no Bluesky-supported system to verify an account or visual indication of verified status, and the microbloging social media platform suffered from an imposter problem. Bluesky approached this in a way by encouraging people to configure and use their own domain names to determine the authenticity of an account.
My account, for example, is linked to lanceulanoff.com, a domain I have owned for years. Bluesky reports that approx. 270,000 accounts have linked their accounts to domains.
Still, creating a domain and connecting it to your Bluesky account is not a trivial case. This new feature simplifies the process significantly.
A new check
According to a new Bluesky blog post, there are now three levels of identity on the platform: the basic Bluesky account, a trusted verifier and a verified account.
The trusted verifier is interesting because it is a verified account that with Bluesky’s Review, can verify other accounts. The given example is the New York Times ‘Bluesky account, which can then verify its journalists’ accounts.
Many years ago, Twitter had something similar where a device like Techradar could ask Twitter directly to verify some of his journalistic staff accounts.
It was not a popular feature among e.g. Celebrities and officials who wondered (often on Twitter) why journalists needed verification. The topic of blue control and verification on Twitter was so filled that Twitter’s then CEO Jack Dorsey stopped verifying accounts for a while. When Elon Musk took over, he removed verifications from millions of accounts, only to return them a few months later.
Who verifies who
Bluesky wrote that it proactively verifies some “authentic and notable stories” which now want a white check in a blue circle.
Reliable verifiers will have a scalloped blue control to indicate their exciting status. Pressing someone’s verified status can show you which trusted verifier assigned verification.
It is not necessarily a foolproof system as I think media companies may be trying to verify all journalists in their camp and Bluesky could push back towards it. Or maybe Bluesky says yes, but at one point “they become remarkable” annoyed because there are suddenly so many non-famous people with control.
One thing that Bluesky does not support is “Requests for verification.” However, the social media platform does not preclude it and has promised that when this system settles and stabilizes, it will “launch a request form for remarkable and authentic accounts that are interested in being verified or trusted verifiers.”
If you wonder about the other decentralized social media platform, threads, it adopts verifications directly from Instagram, another meta -property.
It will be interesting to see what Bluesky is asking for in his future verification process and if any part of it will involve some form of ID.
