3 ms·

Another very cool decision they made for AT Protocol/Bluesky is making user identity domain name-based. So you can just sign up as a subdomain of eg .bsky.socia

Another very cool decision they made for AT Protocol/Bluesky is making user identity domain name-based. So you can just sign up as a subdomain of eg .bsky.social, but you can also bring in a custom domain name. This neatly solves identity-portability and even trust/verification in one swoop (you can also change which domain your bsky profile is identified by, which, I'm not quite sure how that works at a protocol level but it is possible)

giantrobot 3y ago
> This neatly solves identity-portability and even trust/verification in one swoop Until you lose control of the domain for any number of reasons and then whoever buys it happily continue on as you. A simple credit card processing problem can lose your "identity" at some point in the future.
- kuchta 3y ago
  Actually the domain (handle) resolves to your DID which is you primary identifier and which contains your public key and without coresponding private key, nobody would be able to happily continue as you... See: https://atproto.com/guides/identity https://atproto.com/guides/identity. It would be better though if the DID didn't contain the link back to the domain, so that you could continue with your identity under different domain...
- brundolf 3y ago
  The same is true if you use a custom domain for email, for your company's servers, for any number of other critical things. It's no different (and arguably those other things are more catastrophic than losing control of a social media profile) Also, to emphasize, regular people who don't do those other things don't have to roll a custom domain on bsky (and are unlikely to). But eg. if NPR wants to make a bsky account under @npr.org, that's really quite good verification that it's "the real NPR account", and then nobody has to deal with any of the politics around verification which have become a dumpster-fire on twitter since Musk took over
  - giantrobot 3y ago
    Using a domain for verification isn't the worst idea but there's still some things to work out. How will the service handle homoglyphs domains? Are they going to ship a webfont that makes homoglyphs obvious? Will they display punycode? It's all well and good the real NPR can use @npr.org but what will ｎｐｒ.org end up looking like on the service? Will it be distinct enough normal users will be able to distinguish it from the real domain as displayed on the website or app?
    - brundolf 3y ago
      Again, it's a strict improvement over what came before (centrally-managed namespace), and it lumps bsky's problem in with the existing place where the web is already wrestling with these questions. It hitches its cart to the world's biggest and most robust decentralized-identity mechanism; I can't think of a better approach to take, perfect or not.

giantrobot 3y ago

> This neatly solves identity-portability and even trust/verification in one swoop Until you lose control of the domain for any number of reasons and then whoever buys it happily continue on as you. A simple credit card processing problem can lose your "identity" at some point in the future.

kuchta 3y ago
Actually the domain (handle) resolves to your DID which is you primary identifier and which contains your public key and without coresponding private key, nobody would be able to happily continue as you... See: https://atproto.com/guides/identity https://atproto.com/guides/identity. It would be better though if the DID didn't contain the link back to the domain, so that you could continue with your identity under different domain...
brundolf 3y ago
The same is true if you use a custom domain for email, for your company's servers, for any number of other critical things. It's no different (and arguably those other things are more catastrophic than losing control of a social media profile) Also, to emphasize, regular people who don't do those other things don't have to roll a custom domain on bsky (and are unlikely to). But eg. if NPR wants to make a bsky account under @npr.org, that's really quite good verification that it's "the real NPR account", and then nobody has to deal with any of the politics around verification which have become a dumpster-fire on twitter since Musk took over
- giantrobot 3y ago
  Using a domain for verification isn't the worst idea but there's still some things to work out. How will the service handle homoglyphs domains? Are they going to ship a webfont that makes homoglyphs obvious? Will they display punycode? It's all well and good the real NPR can use @npr.org but what will ｎｐｒ.org end up looking like on the service? Will it be distinct enough normal users will be able to distinguish it from the real domain as displayed on the website or app?
  - brundolf 3y ago
    Again, it's a strict improvement over what came before (centrally-managed namespace), and it lumps bsky's problem in with the existing place where the web is already wrestling with these questions. It hitches its cart to the world's biggest and most robust decentralized-identity mechanism; I can't think of a better approach to take, perfect or not.