Bluesky, the upstart, decentralized social network that’s offered an island of blue calm for those departing the tumultuous, dark waters of X (formerly Twitter), is finally introducing an official form of account verification. It will look familiar to those who spent time on old-school Twitter, but it does feature a few notable caveats.
Up until today (April 22, 2025), there was no Bluesky-supported system for verifying an account or visual indication of verified status, and the microblogging social media platform was suffering from an imposter problem. Bluesky addressed this, in a way, by encouraging people to set up and use their own domain names to establish the veracity of an account.
My account, for instance, is attached to lanceulanoff.com, a domain I’ve owned for years. Bluesky reports that some 270,000 accounts have linked their accounts to domains.
Still, setting up a domain and connecting it to your Bluesky account is not a trivial matter. This new feature significantly simplifies the process.
A new check
According to a new Bluesky blog post, there are now three levels of identity on the platform: the basic Bluesky account, a Trusted Verifier, and a Verified Account.
The Trusted Verifier is interesting because it’s a verified account that, with Bluesky’s review, can verify other accounts. The example given is The New York Times’ Bluesky account, which can then verify its journalists’ accounts.
Years ago, Twitter had something similar, where an entity like TechRadar could ask Twitter directly to verify some of its journalist employee accounts.
It was not a popular feature among, for instance, celebrities and officials, who wondered (often on Twitter) why journalists needed verification. The topic of Blue Checks and verification on Twitter became so fraught that, for a time, Twitter’s then-CEO Jack Dorsey stopped verifying accounts. When Elon Musk took over, he removed verifications from millions of accounts, only to return them some months later.
Who verifies who
Bluesky wrote that it is proactively verifying some “authentic and notable accounts,” which will now have a white check in a blue circle.
Trusted Verifiers will have a scalloped blue check to indicate their vaunted status. A tap on someone’s verified status can show you which Trusted Verifier granted verification.
It’s not necessarily a foolproof system, as I think media companies might seek to verify all journalists in their camp, and Bluesky could push back against that. Or maybe Bluesky says yes, but at some point, “the notables” grow irritated because there are suddenly so many non-famous people with checks.
One thing Bluesky is not supporting is “requests for verification.” However, the social media platform is not ruling it out and has promised that as this system settles in and stabilizes, it will “launch a request form for notable and authentic accounts interested in becoming verified or becoming trusted verifiers.”
If you’re wondering about the other decentralized social media platform, Threads, it adopts verifications directly from Instagram, another Meta property.
It’ll be interesting to see what Bluesky asks for in its future verification process and if any part of it will involve some form of ID.
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lance.ulanoff@futurenet.com (Lance Ulanoff)
