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.
Bluesky, on the other hand, aims to build infrastructure that would allow anyone to verify others according to their own rules and policies, similar to how it today lets anyone threads-deprioritizes-politics-blueskys-ceo-touts-custom-feeds-and-user-choice-in-social-media/">build their own feeds, moderation systems, and algorithms.
While Bluesky itself could choose to focus on verifying high-profile users, others could build verification systems that would vet people for other criteria.
For example, Graber suggested that a university could verify users as alums, or a fan group like the Swifties could verify people as community members. These verification providers could choose to be selective in terms of who gets verified, or they could offer more comprehensive services, where verification across a range of different affiliations is a part of their offerings.
The challenge, the CEO said, would be in how to present multiple verifications to the end user so it wouldn’t be confusing. The company needs to figure out how these verifications would appear — as badges, perhaps? — and whether other third-party Bluesky apps would need to display them in the same way as the company’s official client.
“…We’re trying to design long-term for more applications [and] more services, beyond our own, to operate,” noted Graber.
Timing is another question.
The company’s 20-person team has been working to keep up with Bluesky’s growth spike as users began to leave Musk’s X following the U.S. presidential elections and other policy changes, like those that allow X to train AI on user data, and other policies around blocks work. Since the election, Bluesky has added 8.7 million new users and today has topped 22.7 million total users, leaving Meta’s X competitor Threads scrambling to counter the threat with its own set of Bluesky-like features, like switching your default feed alongside an update to its algorithm.
On the livestream, Bluesky’s team talked about other long-term plans, like how Bluesky profiles could be designed to connect users to their broader web presence, including their personal website and other social accounts, similar to something like Linktree.
The company said it couldn’t yet commit to rolling out specific features or a timeline, given its rapid growth.