Hello! Welcome to Verified.Quest, the new home for our artisanal effort to keep Bluesky real.
Below you will find answers to the most common questions about this project, instructions for requesting verification, and details on how to see badges on the Officially Verified accounts in your feed.
The world clearly needs an alternative to Twitter, and Bluesky has “the juice.” We want Bluesky to thrive and at the moment, the platform has no method of verifying handles to show that someone running a given account is actually who they purport to be. This has led to scammers and imposters impersonating journalists, politicians, and celebrities.
Verified.Quest is our effort to address that and to create a more trusted landscape on Bluesky. It’s also something of a public art project that we hope will encourage people to think about the nature of online engagement, identity and authenticity. We do not work with Bluesky and this is a purely volunteer program.
This project was started as an informal effort by Hunter Walker, an investigative reporter and author. Guan Yang subsequently stepped in to help make it a slightly more formal effort and to create a labeler so Bluesky users can see Official Badges for Verified accounts on their feed.
Hunter has been personally verifying each account, which entails communicating with the user through a confirmed third party channel such as an organizational email address to ensure they are who they say they are. This method is not 10,000 percent foolproof, but it offers a high degree of certainty. It is also a decent approximation of the old verified system that existed on Twitter before it was turned into a pay-for-play scheme that has little to do with authenticating identities.
We are currently offering Officially Verified Badges to journalists, members of the media, elected officials, prominent activists, political operatives, and Very Famous Celebrities.
If this is you and you would like to get verified, send us an email. We will do our best to respond to requests as quickly as possible. You can make it a lot easier and faster by sending your request through a confirmable channel such as an email address tied to an organization you work for.
We want to include independent and freelance workers as part of this project. If you don’t have an official email address, think about sending us a link from an organization you have worked with that connects to the email you use or to your own personal page.
For media companies and other ventures that have starter packs, we now have the capability to get your whole team verified at once! Just have someone email us the pack through an official address. Please ensure that you can vouch for the authenticity of every account in your pack! In these cases, we are trusting you to be cool!
You have to subscribe to the Verified.Quest labeler to see the badges on your feed and on Verified profiles. This thread has more detailed instructions for subscribing and displaying badges.
Very Famous Celebrities have a 😎 badge. There are also a very small number political and media types with that badge as it is a relic of our initial system. We have also given the Exclusive Very Famous Celebrity badge to a few of our Real Life Friends and other random people, as is our right.
Journalists and media people have a 🌐 badge and political types get a 🏛 badge. There are a few people who fit multiple categories who may have an Ultra Rare multi badge array.
You will not see your badge until we have received your request and Officially Verified you. Even if we have completed your verification, there may be a lag before we update your badge. Please be patient.
No! Bluesky currently has an option where you can make a custom handle with a domain name that you own. However, this only signifies that you own a given web address. Unless your web address is very well known, it does not authenticate your identity.
Additionally, oftentimes members of a given organization do not have easy access to its domain. Domain name handles can also present issues for freelancers who work between multiple organizations. Finally, it is easy for bad actors to set up spoof domains that are similar to any address. The custom domain option is cool but we think it is separate from verification.
A large number of Bluesky users who have custom handles, their own domains, or who work for organizations that have domains have still chosen to be part of our little verification operation. We see this as living proof these are different things. They can coexist! The beauty of a decentralized system like Bluesky is that everyone can do what works for them.
As “The Dude” once said, that’s just like your opinion, man. Since this project began it has become way more popular than we could have imagined. It has also somehow become more controversial. If, for some reason, this all makes you very Mad Online, we have some good news! You do not have to see this on your feed at all. If you do not subscribe to the labeler, you will not see verified badges.
You can also use the labeler to hide every verified account. This is a completely optional, opt in effort that effects no one who doesn’t want to be involved. Also — and this is very important — it is nice to be nice and it costs you nothing!
We know. This is all extremely Cool and Official. You probably would like to be down with the program as soon as possible. If you fit the criteria, just send us an email and we will get you sorted as soon as possible. It does take a second, so please be patient! We are currently only doing Official Verification for journalists, media, political types, and Extremely Famous Celebrities. There are no plans to expand this to academics or other areas. Perhaps other people will do their own thing! We are currently a two man operation and are also focusing on people who have done documented public and professional work in these fields as they are the most at risk for impersonation.
If you have any other questions please email us or reach out on the feed. We look forward to seeing you out on the friendly skies.
Bluesky has “the juice.”