Internet Handle

[marc]

The reason new social networks rarely adopt domain-based handles is that usernames are one of the few forms of “currency” they have.

Scarce handles create urgency. People rush to sign up and claim their first name, etc. With domain-based handles, that lever disappears.

It’s one of the most common growth tactics I see by social networks launching on BetaList.

[NackerHughes]

Any time you want to sign up for any "open social" platform, you have to rush to claim your domain name. If someone else got there first, too bad. And that domain name applies to every app using this protocol. So no chance to claim it on another app, ever.

So what, exactly, is the difference between this and internet handles? In fact, isn't this worse?

[Squeeze2664]

I suppose the difference is that you only have to rush to claim your domain name (the DNS kind) once and then you get to use it for all "open social" platforms rather than doing that for your username on each platform.

[quasigod]

What do you mean every time? You only need one. Plus theres loads of TLDs for different people to have similar names.

[ChrisArchitect]

I do really enjoy the domain ownership method on bluesky, quick and easy, sorted. But due to the mostly centralized nature there still is a need to rush in there and get your handle on their domain username.bsky.social because still the majority of users believe/recognize the bsky.social handles as 'official'. The nice touch is once you have yours and then switch to your domain Bluesky keeps your previous bsky.social username reserved so you don't have to worry about it.

Another thing with the adoption is we still see tons of major corporate/media/notable entities on there not moving their account to their domain despite having one and it giving them the more obvious "verified" impression. I dunno what's going on in some of those marketing / digital dept's that they aren't jumping to verify on the domains.

[mrsssnake]

Why not take it a step further and get cryptographically proven handle? Instead of relying on global top-to-bottom DNS system?

[account42]

Because people don't like it if they can't reclaim their handle when their house burns down.

[7777777phil]

I would love for this to work!

[catapart]

Tried atproto and bluesky and left the whole ecosystem because the people who made and maintain bsky are shitty people that I don't want to be associated with.

I agree with the "get your own domain" part. But I'm done with the faux decentralization of bsky and wouldn't bother with the time and maintenance investment in any of the other supposed "social media" schemes like mastodon or nostr.

Just putting up my own social network on my own domain and treating it like a blog. Whatever else social media pretends to be useful for, I'm happy to ignore.

[NoraCodes]

How come ActivityPub gets shit for making people pick a server, but nobody complains about the mythical "average user" who is supposedly incapable of figuring anything out on their own when ATProto services ask them to understand DNS?

(It's because ATProto services targeted at average users are effectively centralized, which means everyone else has to put up with whatever Bluesky says or lose their access to the bulk of the network.)

[danabramov]

Bluesky doesn’t ask them to understand DNS, it just gives them a free subdomain to start with. This isn’t very different from how Gmail gives you a gmail.com address. But you can also move it to your own domain later and obviously it’s possible to build user-friendly interfaces for that.