Bluesky is cracking down on parody accounts and impersonators
The decentralized social media platform is getting more aggressive with copycats.
How "decentralized" is it really if they can "crack down" like this?
Outside of people that use federated services, most people don't give a fuck about federation.
Federation? You mean the Galactic Trade Federation?
End users really need to just be more skeptical. Big names need to register their own domain and point people to those places.
"X need to just..." is a surefire way to never change anything. People will never just. They won't.
Gotta be careful with those variable labels…
Early on with twitter, I always wondered how people knew that a celebrity account was real or not. I was bothered by how trusting people were in, what was essentially the honor system. At least with bsky and mastodon, you can register a domain or use your already existing domain as part of your username.
Ha. Someone once told me, "talking is the first step to inaction."
End users really need to just be more skeptical.
That's.... The opposite of a solution.
This is how you make systemic problems worse, not better.
Humans are largely morons, you can't fix this. But you can fix the systems they interact with to avoid their vulnerabilities from being taken advantage of.
But how much do I trust the central authority that would be in charge of implementing that?
Personally, we, individual people, should just be calling out others spreading BS. There's been more then a few times someone has brought me something fishy sounding, I've responded with "and did you hear about that on facebook?"
Theres two ways of looking at safe systems,
Or
As memtioned elsewhere in the thread, political pressure prevents implementation of safe systems. I absolutely love safeguards and being safe because foot guns are nasty. (Its why Rust is a great language.) but I will fight against things clearly created under the former philosophy because it locks people out of their own property. Because sometimes the "safety" is an excuse for controlling behavor.
"Mr Cook, why isn't your company's bluesky account just Apple?"
"Apple was taken. We respect the guff of the individual that currently holds that account. And will be using our current account going forward."
"Do you feel that people may not associate Crabapple@bluesky.social easily with the company?"
"Look... we respect the individual, but we're clearly not happy with the situation."
Apple would just register Apple@Apple.com. We already know Apple computers owns apple.com. Tim Cook would own Cook@Apple.com for official CEO press releases.
So basically Bluesky is going to have to speedrun the first 5 years of Twitter.
Well they're not doing a great job because I just checked and the Bethesda shitpost account is still alive.
That account is following part of the rules that are being enforced.
Bluesky stated, "Parody, satire, or fan accounts are allowed on Bluesky, but they must clearly label themselves in both the display name and bio to help others know the account isn't official."
All they need to do is let people keep their original bsky handle when they switch to domain verification. You'd still see some copycat accounts, but the barrier of entry is now higher as it would require someone to purchase a lookalike domain name
"Parody, satire, or fan accounts are allowed on Bluesky, but they must clearly label themselves in both the display name and bio to help others know the account isn't official."
Seems ok to me?
That's not going to help make people want to switch to your platform.
(considering what’s left behind on Xitter, that’s probably a good thing)
And the enshittification begins...
Look who started it. Look who’s been enthusiastically promoting it the past month or two.
You guys need to learn how to spot a honeypot.
