[joshuaturner]

Initially I just thought they verified people working at Bluesky, which made enough sense, but this initial batch seeming so arbitrarily decided isn't a good look. It feels all too similar to the "I know someone at Twitter" verification in the SF tech community.

[FlyingSnake]

Unfortunately that’s how I’m beginning to see this too, a sign of old school nepotism and struggle to regain lost status. We’ve seen how this unfolded for Twitter.

[LastTrain]

How did that unfold on Twitter? I thought they did it better than anybody before the takeover but maybe I’m missing something.

[idiotsecant]

Do you have a better proposal for preventing spam and scam accounts from impersonating users that a lot of people pay attention to?

[steveklabnik]

Some employees aren't even verified!

I hear you. I haven't investigated every account that got the badge, but it feels to me like they picked people who are both technical and engaged with the protocol, so not entirely arbitrary. That naturally will have some correlation with "I know someone at bsky". I know I've seen accounts that I think are cooler than I am who didn't get verified yet! I'm sure they'll be expanding soon, which will dilute this sort of association.

[joshuaturner]

I can empathize with their position; I know this is something the community, especially the newer users coming from the continued rapid degradation of Twitter, are asking for.

The concept of verification and Bluesky's original mission of decentralization are two very at-odds concepts, and I think they've bridged that pretty well and left a lot of options for themselves to expand it in the future. I'm just worried about the very visible parallels to the Twitter ecosystem emerging.

My opinions on this will change if I join the verified elite, in case any bsky employees are in the thread.

[vehemenz]

An imperfect system is still better than nothing. Look what happened to Twitter with the removal of its verification (before feckless Musk had driven it fully into the ground).