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?
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.
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!
