{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "bskyPostRef": {
    "cid": "bafyreibepsl4wle3nrizqlmu2etdjlscklb5mgnwsxapkrymijxg6y3lui",
    "uri": "at://did:plc:cwdkf4xxjpznceembuuspt3d/app.bsky.feed.post/3lcfvx4tngd2k"
  },
  "canonicalUrl": "https://jack.is/posts/verifying-verification/",
  "description": "alternatively: how I learned to love did:plc",
  "path": "/posts/verifying-verification/",
  "publishedAt": "2024-12-03T15:01:55.000Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:cwdkf4xxjpznceembuuspt3d/site.standard.publication/3mdrpafzz7c2m",
  "tags": [
    "atproto"
  ],
  "textContent": "Imagine it's the late 90s, and you want to see what the New York Times has to\nsay about your favorite political topic this week. Now you've heard they've\nfinally gotten on the InterNet? The World Wide Web? You're not quite sure what\nto call it, but you have a Sunday edition in your living room, and it has a web\naddress in the masthead.\n\nYou open up Netscape Navigator, type in http://www.nytimes.com and your DSL\nconnection chugs for a second as more kilobits than a computer from the 80s\nwould know what to do with fly into your shiny new Dell.\n\nAfter all of that though, you know you're at the New York Times' website, since\nyou went there right from their physical paper. There wasn't a middleman, or\nanyone telling you that they were in fact the Gray Lady, you just did a little\nbit of leg work.\n\nTime Warp\n\nNow it's 2010, and you want to see what the Times has to say about your favorite\npolitical topic this week. You could head to their website, grab the paper\nfrom the guy on the corner, or for your first time you could open up this new\nwebsite called Twitter, and there'd just be a handful of words written by the\nTimes, summarizing a story, and you wouldn't have to go anywhere. How do you\nknow if it's actually the Times? Well Twitter thought of that for you, and they\nadded a little blue checkmark next to their account for you. [^1]\n\nNow you can trust that @nytimes is the Times on Twitter, right? Right? Well for\na while you used to be able to, but eventually it all fell apart. And in my\nopinion, that's a large part of why Bluesky is popping off (or \"has the juice\"\nas the kids say) as Twitter / X slowly begins the doom spiral that any site\nsees in the future as they become no longer relevant.\n\nThe \"problem\"\n\nSo Bluesky / ATProto\nis created to decentralize Twitter (originally, then is spun off entirely pre\nMusk acquisition), and a primary tenet of both Bluesky PBLLC (the corporation)\nand\nATProto (the protocol itself) is to ensure that long term, the ecosystem is\nprotected from any actor in the space from turning hostile. There's no \"special\nsauce\" that Bluesky PBLLC has (other than chat/DMs but we'll set that aside for\nthe time being) that is exclusive to them.\n\nEvery part of the ecosystem then needs to be designed to be hostile-proof,\nfrom where user data lives, to how users consume and create data. This goes as\nfar as how user identities are stored and referenced. There's been a lot of work\nput in to ensure that in the long run, you are totally in control of your\nidentity, not Bluesky PBLLC.\n\nSo the \"problem\" here is that Bluesky doesn't have a concept of verification,\nat least not the way Twitter had. There is no \"central arbiter\" of trust,\nbecause how can you have a central arbiter of trust when the entire ecosystem\nis designed to avoid that single point of failure?\n\nInstead all the \"verification\" is done with domain names, and there's been\nmore than a few folks upset / weirded out / annoyed that there isn't as much\nverification as there was on Twitter.\n\nThe more I think about it though, the less I think it is a problem, and more\nus as a social media using society not remembering the olden days.\n\nWhy this matters\n\nWe've spent the last 10-15 years forgetting that the web is a protocol, not a\nplatform. Mike Masnick touched on this in Protocols, not Platforms\n(and in fact is now on the board of Bluesky PBLLC). In the example of the 90s,\nthere wasn't a platform saying whether or not the NYTimes on the web was\n\"verified\", there was just a little bit of legwork to check and crosscheck that\nindeed this website was theirs. There was no middleman, just a protocol.\n\nHowever, in the next time warp, we're instead relying on these centralized\nparties to decide who is and isn't verified, and shifts us to treating the web\nas a platform, not a protocol. People don't browse the web, they use Facebook,\nthey use Twitter.\n\nThe concept of domain handles, verification, the whole nine on how Bluesky\nhandles this is the first step on getting us as an internet-using society _back_\nto protocols.\n\nA domain is the most ownership of anything you can have on the web. If a new\nATProto social site opens up, you know that jack.is there is also me, just\nlike you know it's my Bluesky account, just like you know it's the site you're\nreading right now. I own my identity, not Instagram, or Twitter, or Bluesky, and\nI think that means something more than a little check in a circle that gives me\nthe good feelings.\n\n[^1]: \"So you see, that's where the trouble began. That check; that damned check\"",
  "title": "Verifying verification"
}