THE rapid growth social media startup Blue skyan alternative to Twitter/X built on the principles of the open web, revealed in a live broadcast Monday how its approach to verifying user accounts will differ from existing services, like Meta and identity, Bluesky envisions a system where multiple verification providers exist to meet the needs of its broader community.

Currently, the only way to verify your account on Bluesky is to adopt a custom domain name, which the company has started offering as an option. last year. This is how you know that the account @nytimes.com on Bluesky belongs to the real The New York Times publication, for example. Additionally, Bluesky directly addresses identity theft issues as soon as they arise.

However, Bluesky believes that custom domains may only be part of the solution when it comes to verification in the future.

In the future, the company envisions a model in which multiple verification providers coexist.

Jay Graber, CEO of Bluesky, explained: “…we could be a verification provider – and we could at some point (and also, no, I don’t know when). But it would be something that you would access through an 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 verification – or do their own. Or other people could do theirs.

Or, in other words, Bluesky offers a verification system in which one entity – the company itself – does not have sole control over who gets the “verified” label and who does not.

It is about rethinking verification in relation to the way these systems have traditionally worked and their more recent evolution.

On Twitter, verification has been fraught with pitfalls and concerns over the years. Twitter originally verified certain high-profile users, but also ignored those who thought they deserved verification, creating a sort of two-tiered class system.

Under new owner Elon Musk, the company attempted to overhaul this system to make it more democratic by allowing someone to pay to check themselves. But, as expected, this radical change did not go well, because users purchased verification checks in order to impersonate others on the platform, causing chaos.

Even today, X continues to have a problem with verified robotswhich devalued the meaning of a verified check.

Meta, meanwhile, followed Twitter/X with paid verification which serves mainly to help creators and companies on its platform.

Bluesky, on the other hand, aims to build an infrastructure that would allow anyone to verify others according to their own rules and policies, much in the same way it allows anyone to verify others according to their own rules and policies today. create their own feeds, moderation systemsAnd algorithms.

While Bluesky itself might choose to focus on verifying high-level users, others might create verification systems that screen people based on other criteria.

For example, Graber suggested that a university could verify users as alumni, or that a fan group like the Swifties could verify people as community members. These verification providers might choose to be selective in terms of who they verify, or they might offer more comprehensive services, in which verification on a range of different affiliations is part of their offerings.

The challenge, the CEO said, would be how to present multiple checks to the end user so that there is no confusion. The business needs to understand how these verifications would appear – as badges, perhaps? – and whether other third-party Bluesky apps should display them the same way as the company’s official client.

“…We’re trying to think long term about how more applications (and) more services will work, beyond our own,” Graber noted.

Timing is another question.

The company’s 20-person team struggles to keep up Bluesky’s growth spurt as users began leaving Musk’s allow X to train AI on user dataand others the policies around blockages work. Since the elections, Bluesky has added 8.7 million new users and today has exceeded 22.7 million total usersleaving Threads, Meta’s X competitor, scrambling to counter the threat with its own set of Bluesky-like features, like change your default feed alongside a updating its algorithm.

During the livestream, the Bluesky 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 specific feature rollouts or a timeline, given its rapid growth.