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@ernie @tedium oof. I was follow this a bit from BS today but couldn't figure out what the hell was going on from just glancing at the Skyline. I definitely get the impression that the Trust and Safety team over on BlueSky is underwater. It sure seems like there's a lot of bad actors testing them lately 😕

@McNeely @tedium I can understand why not—it was really complicated and hard to explain.

@ernie @tedium is verification by domain new for BlueSky? I haven't paid very much attention to their verification methods

@McNeely @tedium Nope, been there since day one.

@ernie @tedium I don't have a lot of (or any, really) faith in the moderation team, after seeing them bend over backwards to appease Singal.

@ernie @tedium those who have closely followed the development of Bluesky and the underlying ATProto architecture know that moderation was an afterthought. Graber and others saw a trashfire smouldering during the invite only beta and moved forward with composable moderation against the wishes of Dorsey to put it out. It is a big reason Dorsey cut ties.

Though I think Blusky's intentions are generally good and they strive to provide a safe place to be online the ATmosphere was not designed with moderation, verification or privacy controls at a fundamental level. Its central tenet is *distribution* above all else. All the rest of it is provided by layers upon the shitcake. This here is a consequence of that. It can be made to work but it will take serious thought and work.

The veneer of moderation and verification and so forth is at this point substantially provided at the app view level. Not only can fedi apps ape this functionality they could do it better (and should).

@ernie I was wrong; both accounts seem legit. She only appears to have linked to the campaign account from X, which limits what users can see without being signed in. Without a link on her site or post on any publicly searchable site (not X), it was hard to confirm it was real.

Which comes back to the point: "Elected officials should use custom domain handles like @warren.senate.gov to verify accounts."

@MeDueleLaTeta @tedium you can verify with any domain under the sun honestly. The problem is that it's the only real verification system

i totally hate assholes who consider this kind of extortion a norm and make it their business.

however…

1. Every domain names reseller (godaddy, etc) basically does this in only slightly nuanced forms and it's considered ok by most ppl including the good guys of this story.

2. The western culture has an unhealthy fixation on celebrities of any level and their entitlement to… things that are, generally speaking, not unique, like domain names, etc.