Rob PegoraroAs the ongoing flight from Twitter has continued, it’s been heartening to see so many familiar names show up on Bluesky, the Twitter alternative that comes closest to replicating what I liked about Twitter when it wasn’t run by a shitposting billionaire with a toxic social-media diet and a victimhood complex.
At least, I think those are familiar names. But because Bluesky’s only equivalent of Twitter’s now-ruined verification system is changing DNS settings to set your domain name as your handle there, I can’t assume that somebody popping up on Bluesky with a username, profile picture and bio matching their Twitter self is actually the same person.
As the newsroom saying goes, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”
My first move in those cases is to check the Twitter profile of the person whom I think has jumped into the Bluesky escape pod. If their Twitter display name, bio or pinned tweet shows a Bluesky handle, I’m all set. If it doesn’t, I’ll search their tweets for “bluesky” or “bsky” (the latter being part of a standard Bluesky handle).
If that doesn’t work but I’ve already confirmed that this person is on Mastodon, I’ll check their profile on that federated social network for a Bluesky mention. If that doesn’t yield any confirmation, I’ll check the person’s Web page, blog or author profile.
My last resort is to see who follows this person on Bluesky. And sometimes that works: After seeing somebody who appeared to be the staffer for my Congressman who offers informed and sarcastic commentary on House politics on Twitter surface on Bluesky without mentioning that on the site that Elon Musk has renamed to “X,” I checked the guy’s followers list on Bluesky and saw that my tech-savvy Rep. Don Beyer (D.-Va.) was among them. That seemed good enough for me.
But if you want to make it easy for potential followers on Bluesky, don’t make them do all that research. Tell people how to find you there in some public and obvious way, whether it’s a tweet, an update to your Twitter profile, or an edit to whatever corner of the Web you can rewrite at will. And on that note: Yes, I really am robpegoraro.com on Bluesky.
#Bluesky #BlueskyDomainNameHandle #BlueskyIdentity #BlueskyUser #bsky #socialMediaVerification #TwitterVerification
