Human social trust works great at small scale. You go to Jim the butcher because everybody you know in town regularly goes to Jim the butcher and they know he's

Human social trust works great at small scale. You go to Jim the butcher because everybody you know in town regularly goes to Jim the butcher and they know he's been making meat pretty well for a long time. An automated version of this system might say "we verify anybody who at least N people within 3-4 steps of your followers graph are also following." In a big city, you go to the store that's labeled "Butcher" and figure that, because the building is quite permanent and there's a lot of butchery stuff in there and it seems clean and there are people going in and out, then it's probably a fine butcher shop. No real "social" trust involved. An automated version of this is probably domain checking, follower count, checking that N other 'verified' accounts follow it, some basic "is this a known malicious actor" checks, waiting until the account has some age, etc. Still kind of distributed, but not really relying on your own social trust metrics. What's fun is that Bluesky allows you to implement both of those mechanisms yourself.