What happens when those individuals stop being NYT reporters? Does @nytimes.com leave them verified? Or does that account yank the verification? And who's to say @nytimes.com is only verifying NYT reporters?

> Also, why do you say that in any circumstance? Who do you trust?

People I've met in person, for one. Bluesky has an opportunity to make the old-school web-of-trust idea mainstream, with UI around "Is this someone you've met face-to-face?" and then extending that with multiple levels of checkmarks based on how many degrees of separation exist between a given user's verified personhood and your own.

Organizations actually accountable to the general public, for another. Not some corporation, even if it's a publicly-traded one like the NYT. This is the exact sort of thing that government agencies could be implementing independently as a service to their residents (like I mentioned elsewhere). Or private-sector non-profits; Associated Press would be much more trustworthy than the NYT by that virtue alone, and yet @apnews.com ain't even verified at all, let alone given the magic "trusted verifier" powers. Why?

Barring that, I trust nobody. A blue checkmark doesn't convince me someone's "real". It just convinces me someone got a blue checkmark. I'd rather see that checkmark actually mean something that I can independently verify. Keybase had the right idea there, with the ability to add proofs to your various online accounts to assert "yes, these belong to the same person"; that would be something worthy of some checkmarks. I'd be thrilled to see little icons for "yes, there's a bidirectional connection between @foo.bsky.social and github.com/foo / reddit.com/u/foo / news.ycombinator.com/user?id=foo / etc.".