We learned earlier this week of a Bluesky extortion issue, emerging after the social network said that it would use domain name ownership as a way to verify the identity of public figures.
Bluesky hasn’t fully addressed the issue, but has taken one step toward reducing the problem of scammers impersonating well-known people on the platform …
Bluesky extortion problem
Cybersquatting – where someone buys the domain names of well-known people in order to impersonate them, or to try to sell the domain at a vastly inflated price – has long been a problem.
But social network Bluesky made things worse when it announced that it would use domain name ownership as a means of verifying the rightful owner of a username on the platform. For example, if you own the domain johnnyappleseed.com, then Bluesky would allow you to use that same name and domain on its network.
That led to scammers trying to extort some well-known people by registering their domain name and then pointing out that they wouldn’t be able to use their own name on Bluesky without acquiring it. Bloomberg columnist Conor Sen posted an example of one of these extortion attempts:
Hi Conor. I own conorsen.com As you may know Bluesky is using .com domains to verify Bluesky accounts. bsky.social/about/blog/4…. Right now we are configuring an email sign up sheet with your favicon at the domain.
If you choose to try and report and suspend bsky.app/. profile/cono… then you will not be able to verify the domain yourself. It will look like the verified domain got suspended. You can make an offer for the domain or do nothing.
TechCrunch notes that this led to a thread in which real and fake versions of Hustle founder Sam Parr were arguing.
Partial protection added
TechCrunch reports that Bluesky has addressed one aspect of the problem, by protecting your original username when you switch to a custom domain.
Bluesky is also adding protection against username squatting by reserving your original Bluesky username with (.bsky.social suffix) when you change your username to a custom domain.
For example, if Johnny originally registered as johnnyappleseed.bsky.social and then later updated this to johnnyappleseed.com, then someone else would have been able to grab the original username. Bluesky has now blocked this.
Your Mentions now have their own tab
Separately, the app has added a separate tab for Mentions, rather than having these buried within the Notifications tab.
You also get new ways to sort replies.
Users can choose between linear and threaded views. They can also sort replies using different filters like hot, oldest, newest, most-liked, and random.
Bluesky recently passed 25M users, but so far Threads appears to have the best shot at replacing the social network formerly known as Twitter.
Photo by Yohan Marion on Unsplash
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