No one disliked the check mark before “Genghis Kunt” started selling it
Then come over to Mastodon…
Bluesky is the new X. After canceling the accounts of Turkish protesters this is the next step for the big money behind Bluesky. That’s why I deleted my account a few days ago.
Same. Deleted my account when they started to censor the Turkish protestors. Not that I used the account really but still.
Yous are hyping it a basic verification system which can’t be bought and is handed out for the sake of showing credibility is a good thing
Preaching to the choir
But anyway anyone who thinks bluesky is actually decentralised will learn sooner rather than later that that’s not the case
Something like this unavoidable.
Example, ted cruz the car mechanic in marfa Texas has just has much right to use blusky as
professional shit bagsenator ted cruz. But hiw do tell the real one from the racid sack of weasels.People use usernames like they always have, and rely on reputation to distinguish themselves from the fakes? Senator ted ceuz makes an account called ‘senatortedcruz’ or if thats taken ‘therealsenatortedcruz’, and the mechanic makes one called ‘tedcruzcars’ or whatever. I dont see how your example is even relevant, because under a checkmark verification system both the mechanic ted cruz, and the senator ted cruz would be valid and deserving of a check mark, so there has to be some other way of distinguishing them anyway.
Its whay the original lawsuit that created checkmarks was about.
What is? How does a checkmark help distinguish between two people that have the same name? The checkmark just shows that the person is who they say they are.
mastodon exists
This shitshow sounds familiar.
So long as the checkmark isn’t bought through some subscription service, I’m fine with this.
The whole reason why verification exists is because other will steal the name of someone famous and masquerade as them, with real world consequences. A verification system now means that certain platforms and people will get more attracted to be there, and thus Bluesky will grow.
It’s not.
Not yet 😏
My default is to just assume that they aren’t the same person unless corroborated by that person.
Unfortunately, the forecast isn’t good for the integrity of what should be a simple system. Under Dorsey, the Twitter blue checkmark had already become a tool for showing content approval by Twitter. In various instances users had their status removed based on their content and not on a question of if they were who they claimed to be.
To quote my well known journalist friend after switching from twitter “what’s that? Oh, that open source stuff? Hahaha nah bruh, mastodon is silly”
Reminds me of a meeting my co-worker and I had with the IT staff of a company that is a customer using research instruments in our facility. The meeting was to ask us to enable data synchronization through SharePoint. (We’re a Linux shop.) We asked what the issue was with getting their data files with SFTP. They said, “It’s open source.”
Then, a few beats of silence as it sinks in for us that there is no next step in the chain of logic. That is the totality of their objection.
Ok so they knew enough about software to use open source correctly in a sentence, but could not even list one reason why they didn’t want to use it.
Normies will not go on Mastodon.
This was always bait to keep people using corporate social media instead of decentralizing. I am not sorry for the users one bit.
You eeediots!
Ren from Ren and Stimpy?
idk man I haven’t seen anyone complaining about it on Bluesky
This is a net positive, nice to have a social media where verification checks are…actually used for verifying the person behind an account
Based on how verification was revoked for some users on Twitter based on their content rather than question of their identity, I’m cautious about this system turning into the status symbol it became on Twitter rather than the verification it claimed to be.
Most of the complaints I’ve seen were about Bluesky’s lack of a formal verification system.
They could never figure out how the current system of checking the username.
But isn’t the domain already doing that?
Domains only help you verify organizations and individuals you recognize directly.
This verification system also allows 3rd parties (it’s NOT just bluesky themselves!) to issue attestations that s given account belongs to who they say they are, which would help people like independent journalists, etc.
Idk. Celebrities and Politicians usually have other vetted channels such as their own website or a website of their ogranization representing them. It should be basic journalistic work to see if their social media links link to the account in question or not.
I feel like domain usernames are still inherently susceptible to phishing, you can get a typo or similar character to try and trick someone that your username is an official one
The problem with domains is that regular people would need to know what a domain is and what verified ownership says about the account in question.
Even then, reading domains is quite difficult, even for people who know about the topic: Humans are Bad at URLs and Fonts Don’t Matter
That link was a super interesting read!
I saw some small talk about it, and it really just boiled down to domain verification is great for more tech savvy folks, but trying to get larger accounts (think politicians, celebrities, etc) is a lot harder. Having a visual check, using tools within the app or site, is a lot easier.
And personally I like the idea of verification checks as long as it remains a simple means to do just that: verify the owner of the account. Morons like Musk and his ilk always thought it was a clout thing, and for a small minority that was probably the case, but by and large before he ruined it, it was great.
If they are, and there isn’t anything to display it, how are we to know what’s been vetted and what’s slipped through the cracks? Especially on a new account?
It’s the username so already quite visible.
For example someone at say, NPR, could use a name like @bob.npr.org which is only possible by verifying ownership of the npr.org domain name, so there is no need to vet anything.
That’s great for an organization like NPR which may have the resources to tie its own domain name into Bluesky. For some freelance reporter or otherwise verifiable person, I’m not sure it’s quite so practical.
I do not see anything to be angry or disappointed about?
Verification badge was good, the dumb thing Twitter did was throw it away by letting anyone pay for it.
If the same authority is doing verification that is also doing moderation and both ultimately in a for profit setting, that has conflict of interest.
We dont know how reliable bluesky moderation will stay. We dont know how they will respond to political pressure. We dont know how they will monetize past the growth phase and then could also argue a “service fee” for verification.
In a perfect world none of these would happen, but then everybody could still be on twitter and be fine there.
Nah it was not good. Domain names already do that and are accessible to all at all times with full transparency and decentralization. Bluesky is literally regressing.
Even mastodon’s verification system is better than checkmarks.
domain names do that for people with well known domain names, and verification processes do that for people without
Yup. Need something like EV certs to really verify… And that would only make sense if it’s a “no (non-real) screennames” kind of thing.
Far from perfect, but I think it’s good to have a layer that very visibly shows ‘yes, this is the account you want’.
Domains are a worthwhile addition, but they run into almost the same problem as usernames and handles. Can be made misleading easily - sure, I could often go to the web address and verify it (if they don’t put up a convincing fake site), but that’s much lower visibilty.
Eg, you can probably register [email protected] or similar and get it by some folks just as easily as registering the Twitter handle. There’s a payment step to get the domain, but that’s about it.
The centralization problem you mention is a good point though. It was a fine system, if you felt like you could trust Twitter as a verifier. Today obviously, one could not. But Bsky seems to at least theoretically have a ‘choose your verification provider’ idea in mind, which would (again theoretically) resolve a lot of that issue.
Bluesky, the decentralized social network […]
Were only one instance exist or did I miss something?
I think their initial selling point was that Eventually©®™ Bluesky would federate with the rest of the Fediverse.
Is anybody really surprised that a social media corporation didn’t make it their utmost priority to allow their userbase to connect out of their proprietary platform?
They never said they’d do so natively with other protocols - but they support Bridgy, so you already can do that.
Interesting how other instances of the fediverse have no such restrictions. It’s almost as if they want to make it as difficult as possible so that people just don’t federate.
As I understand it, the protocol has the ability to decentralize built in. But the technical requirements are prohibitively high to the point only large businesses or corps could afford to do it. I also believe (someone correct me) the company hasn’t switched on the functionality yet.
Maybe you remember PDS federation not being open for a while, but it’s open now.
Running a public appview can be very expensive, but they’re working on making it cheaper to run one with a limited scope.
The biggest thing is that you need to be manually authorized by them for federation. They will only ever federate with servers that arent serious enough competition to lead to democratization of the overall network.
No, PDS federation is fully open now.
They’re also actively supporting development of 3rd party appviews and relays.
The power dynamic is still 1000000:1 they can do whatever they want and you will have to follow. If they defederate you, there is no value in your self hosted instance.
my mom has always told me that I had the potential to work at NASA. but the requirements are prohibitively high
I believe in you!
all you need is a work ethic and a time machine
Last heard (a few months ago) the cost is in storage. The protocol isn’t too complicated now, but it generates a shit ton of data, and IIRC you need a minimum of 3 copies.
Storage is cheap whwn it comes to webhosting and 3 replicas is honestly not much when it comes to enterprise standards. I think cloud storage providers like backblaze keep something like 9 copies of data across different mediums
Nope, it’s 100% centralized.
It’s 100% centralized, but with the ability to be decentralized. Sorta like Threads before they started federating
Sure, but until it actually gets used significantly in that way, we might as well just say it’s centralized.
The “ability” to decentralize has costs that scale quadratically. So in every practical sense, it cannot be decentralized. At best it could have a few servers that participate.
No, it doesn’t scale “quadratically”. That’s what going viral on Mastodon does to a small instance, not on bluesky. Pretty much everything scales linearly. The difference is certain components handle a larger fraction of the work (appview and relay).
Both a bluesky appview and a Mastodon instance scales by the size of the userbase which it interacts with. Mastodon likes to imagine that the userbase will always be consistent, but it isn’t. Anything viewed by a large part of the whole Mastodon network forces the host to serve the entirety of the network and all its interactions. So does a bluesky appview, in just the same way, but they acknowledge this upfront.
Meanwhile, you CAN host a bluesky PDS account host and have your traffic scale only by the rate of your users’ activity + number of relays you push these updates to. Going viral doesn’t kill your bandwidth.
This is a little bit more black and white compared with the other responses. 🙈
You can easily host your own instance with a simple docker stack.
I dont know of any public instances except the main but I also havent searched.
you can host your own PDS, but everyone is still using the same appview
