Bluesky Verification details, Community Verifying Dev & App Accounts?

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It looks like a wave of verifications are rolling out for ATProto community members, being done “proactively” – e.g. my personal account got verified and I never filled out the form – and the community account just got its checkmark:

Aaron has been actively posting about this, good info in the replies to @mackuba.eu

Specifically, that individuals and organizations actively aren’t interested in learning about domain names and mapping them, and want this centralized verification.

That’s a rough summary, and is disappointing, not in the “I wish people would learn protocol details”, but more like “everyone up to and including policy people and governments actively don’t understand or care how the Internet works”.

Community Verifier

As we wrote in the ATProto Community post, we had actually filled out the form and been interested in “verifier” status for the community account, so that much like @trezy.codes and his Game Dev labeler, the community could verify active community participants and app accounts.

Personally not going to push on this, but if anyone wants to work on this, it’s something we could push for / maybe get done “in person” at ATmosphereConf?

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with Atprotocol.dev as a trusted verifier I’d personally, even though it will be unpopular like to see requirements like:

  • domain as handle
  • non-bluesky PDS (i expect the most pushback on this)
  • code repos for apps in use daily on github or tangled
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Yeah I wouldn’t set the bar at non-bluesky PDS, but the other two are low bars.

The intent here is much like a labeler from my POV – yes, this is a “real” person / project who are well intentioned to the best of our knowledge.

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iirc we wanted to make this a verification requirement earlier on and had to back away from it because it was not a reasonable expectation of many of the users we wanted to verify and ultimately seemed arbitrary. I can certainly see the argument for it, but just FYI it might become frustrating.

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From an ATProtocol community ecosystem perspective, the tone here is “we expect mapping a domain and understanding DNS to be a low bar and we will help you understand it”

Not reasonable for a mass market, totally a thing we can celebrate in people learning in their path as builders and makers.

I really do need to get a domain name registrar partnership set up with like … referral fees so this can fund community activities!

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  1. porkbun is one of my favorites!
  2. @alex.bsky.team there are dozens of us spreading the good word of how to use domain as a handle, so we’ll keep chipping away at it
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Hello everyone,

I would like to understand the verification badge operations/lexicon.

I understand that it is on an invite basis for verifying accounts on Bluesky. But since Bluesky is only one app on the atmosphere it would be nice to know how those verifications work.

The goal is to follow this as a standard, so that in the future if third-party appY has verified 10k users, Bluesky/appZ can decide whether they want to trust this third-party appY, and in return display the badge for those 10k users on the bsky.app/appZ itself.

Is the verification written to the PDS? Or are these verifications private data like bookmarks?

Would love to learn more, thanks!

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Heya!

Yes verification records are like follows - any account can write them to their own PDS, pointing to the account they are verifying.

eg cred blue by @dame.is let’s anyone login and verify cred.blue

App views and/or client apps can set which are “verifier” accounts. If you go to Deer Social https://deer.social you can set any account as a verifier.

(I may move this into its own thread because it would be good to link to as docs)

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