Bluesky, the decentralized social network offered to an island of blue blue that leave the tumultuous dark waters of X (previously Twitter), is finally introducing an official form of verification of accounts. It will be familiar for those who spent time on Twitter of the old school, but presents some notable warnings.
Until today (April 21, 2025), there was no system with Bluesky support to verify an account or visual indication of verified state, and the social media platform of microblogging suffered from an impostor problem. Bluesky addressed this, in a way, encouraging people to configure and use their own domain names to establish the veracity of an account.
My account, for example, is attached to lanceulanooff.com, a domain that I have had for years. Bluesky informs that some 270,000 accounts have linked their accounts to domains.
Even so, configuring a domain and connecting it to your Bluesky account is not a trivial issue. This new characteristic significantly simplifies the process.
A new check
According to a new bluesky blog post, there are now three levels of identity on the platform: Bluesky’s basic account, a trusted verifier and a verified account.
The trust verifier is interesting because it is a verified account that, with Bluesky’s Review, you can verify other accounts. The given example is the New York Times Bluesky account, which can then verify the accounts of its journalists.
Years ago, Twitter had something similar, where an entity like Techradar could ask Twitter directly to verify some of its accounts of journalist employees.
It was not a popular characteristic between, for example, celebrities and officials, who wondered (often on Twitter) why journalists needed verification. The issue of checks and blue verification on Twitter became so tense that, for a while, the then Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsy, stopped verifying the accounts. When Elon Musk took over, he eliminated millifications of millions of accounts, only to return them a few months later.
Who verifies who
Bluesky wrote that he is proactively verifying some “authentic and notable accounts”, which will now have a white check in a blue circle.
Trust verifiers will have a feastless blue check to indicate their status. A touch in the verified state of someone can show him what trusted verifier granted the verification.
It is not necessarily an infallible system, since I think that media companies could try to verify all journalists in their camp, and Bluesky could reject that. Or maybe Bluesky says yes, but at some point, “the notables” are irritated because there are suddenly many non -famous people with checks.
One thing that Bluesky is not compatible is “verification requests.” However, the Social Network Platform does not rule it out and has promised that as this system is established and stabilized, “it will launch an application form notable and authentic requests interested in verifying or becoming confidence verifiers.”
If you ask about the other decentralized platform of social networks, threads, it adopts verifications directly from Instagram, another target property.
It will be interesting to see what Bluesky requests in his future verification process and if any part of it will imply some form of identification.
