1. Your username can be your website. I'm @bradgessler.com.
2. Copy and pasting images into a message works on iOS (this has been broken on X/Twitter for a long time).
There's more reasons to like it, but these two feel pretty great.
I put a Ruby hacker starter pack together if you're looking for a way in:
There's tons of other ones and communities as well.
But more importantly, you have to verify that you own the domain. I can't sign up as google.com
Time will tell—ultimately it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If people “believe” and sign up, it will happen.
11 years ago I made a social media aggregator where users had to have a verified domain to join - think using your domain as username and using you domain to authenticate your social media profiles. My show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6529523
This probably sounds silly but in the end I didn’t actually use Bluesky because they don’t support emoji domains.
Because I can imagine them not implementing support to limit lookalike codepoints being used in handles, or they just hadn't gotten around to supporting punycode in their domain verifier.
This wave does feel very different though. People joining in large numbers (I gained more followers in a day than in a year on Mastodon). The Bluesky app itself is actually very nice. Twitter is becoming more and more unbearable with the force-feeding of ads and totally broken search (that's without even mentioning the post-election environment).
You might be right, but I do feel like this time is different. Let's check back in 12 months and see.
@nickfisherau.bsky.social if anyone wants to say hello.
Emojis are tricky, most domain registrars can’t get them right, most browsers can’t get at least some right (usually the ones with ZWJ characters.
So by no means a knock on Bluesky, but I was waiting for an invite code for so long just to be able to use an emoji as my identity.
Not directed at you, but not sure why my initial comment was downvoted, it’s pretty damn hard for new social media platforms to get users from other platforms - and as domain identity/usernames is a main competitive feature and I was super excited then didn’t end up using it, sharing my experience might be worth more than downvoting
Only about a dozen ccTLDs have authorized support for them and allow them to be registered.
Browsers support them, it’s just certain emojis a nearly universally problematic and don’t resolve. Otherwise long as the ccTLD supports DNSSEC the emoji domain names support DNSSEC just the same include those that don’t resolve it browsers.
ICANN rules allow ccTLDs to create emoji/punycode domains - domain registrars and TLD owners are not going rouge and allowing registration of domains in violation of ICANN rules or policies.
Not sure if you know Ben he’s launched a lot of small projects here on HN a few hitting front page and going viral in the HN/product hunt communities, but one of them was Mailoji - basically a cool story of him registering hundreds of single emoji domains and creating email (forwarding) service with them. As one might imagine it didn’t just go viral on HN/product hunt but on TikTok with the kids.
As far as Bluesky they definitely could support emoji domains, I understand the argument that it takes extra effort to do that and they may not see it as worth the time and effort - but I’d be more open minded about the opportunity and appeal to younger users.
1. Your username can be your website. On Bluesky, domain verification (by DNS) maps to a `did:plc` identifier – ˋAppView`s (bsky.app, the Bluesky smartphone app, etc.) only look up to plc.directory, a “database” owned by Bluesky. For your username to REALLY be your domain name, Bluesky would need to support the `did:web` kind of identifiers, which they don’t. In short, your username maps to an internal database, which is what X does too.
2. Bluesky’s basically Twitter before it needed to give money back to investors. I’d bet money that we will be seeing more broken features ten years from now when Bluesky will have to focus on how to give the money back to investors.
(Yes, I am slightly biased towards ActivityPub, even though Bluesky has better architecture.)
Well, they can't prohibit it, strictly speaking, they don't have such authority, but I remember them strongly discouraging it and advicing against delegation of such domains. Did something change their stance? I'd like to read that.
And the rules of IDNA2008 certainly did not change, they still prohibit emoji in domain names.
Let’s say you are the owner of the example.org domain, and would like to federate your content to the Bluesky servers. The Bluesky servers are currently unable to make use of a `did:web:example.org` DID (that would induce a request to https://example.org/.well-known/did.json).
All you can do is tell all the Bluesky AppViews that your @example.org nickname is an alias to your `did:plc` in Bluesky’s plc.directory “database”. So it’s just a local mapping between a domain and an account, that’s somehow secured by a DNS verification (but non-techies don’t know it, and someone on X could very well make use of your domain as a local nickname too).
I would appreciate being proven wrong, though!