Bluesky and Domain Names as Handles
It's been interesting times as there are a flood of new social networks, all spinning up as Twitter decays. But what's interesting about these new social networks is that they are protocols, not singular apps on singular network infrastructure, which gives a lot of future options.
Jay Graber of Bluesky just wrote up Domain names as handles and points out three benefits:
- You can tell which accounts are authentic based on the websites they’re associated with.
- You can use the same handle to identify you across social media services.
- You can keep a custom domain handle when you switch services.
Read her post for the full details, where she expands on each of the bullet points.
I could've chosen bmannconsulting.com for my handle, but I picked this bmann.ca domain, which has had nothing on it except for this hosted Ghost blog that I don't post to :)
The magic underneath is DIDs in DNS text records:
Which is very similar to how we put DIDs in Fission subdomain account records:
And yes, dnsrecords.io is a really useful service for demoing DNS records, including that they make for nice embedding.
See you on Bluesky, Mastodon, Farcaster, and everywhere else on open web social!