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Comment by dom96 | Hacker News Reader

> By the end of 2025, we had verified 4,327 accounts total: 3,567 verified directly by Bluesky and 777 verified by our network of 21 Trusted Verifiers.

It would be nice to see some more transparency around the decisions of whether an account gets verified or not. So far it’s feeling like a “cool club” with little rhyme or reason with regards to certain verification decisions.

Related to that is also the need to add more trusted verifiers. Are there any plans to allow third parties to provide verification services or is it always only going to be journalistic and educational institutions?

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> So far it’s feeling like a “cool club” with little rhyme or reason with regards to certain verification decisions.

That's how Twitter started, and when the policy changed, the "cool club" members threw public tantrums (some of which still seethe to this day).

It's all very high-school cafeteria clique to me.

Regardless, it was weird to try to convert that into a "I paid" check-mark.

> Are there any plans to allow third parties to provide verification services or is it always only going to be journalistic and educational institutions?

Anyone can put together a moderation service that labels accounts that they’ve vetted or blacklisted. It wouldn’t be that taxing to host one, but the labor to maintain it is a different story.

Yes, anyone can. But unless Bluesky treats it as a trusted verifier then it doesn’t have much practical use.

I guess I don’t appreciate the distinction between verification and an account labeler.

If you use a 3rd party client like witchsky.app, you can trust or distrust any account you want to be a labeller and verify accounts yourself if desired.

Worth keeping in mind, the original plan was to entirely rely on domain names being used as handles for verification. All ~500 .gov handled accounts on there are almost certainly who they claim to be, unless they are able to set DNS records on those domains.

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