Over on Bluesky, I caught a fairly up-close view of the system not working.
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Over on Bluesky, I caught a fairly up-close view of the system not working. I didn’t like what I saw.
https://tedium.co/2024/12/17/bluesky-impersonation-risks/
new @tedium
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@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).
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@ernie @tedium I saw a huge wave of imposter accounts there two weeks ago and even noticed bsky featuring a fake Elizabeth Warren account on the top of their “suggested accounts” feed. I posted about it here https://bsky.app/profile/docpop.org/post/3lcjeaimu722n
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@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."