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Comment by pfraze | Hacker News Reader

Every account gets identified by a DID which is long-lived but not human readable. Records use them instead of domains for links/follows/etc. That's how domain-name changes or debindings avoid causing issues.

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So the domain is just a shortcut for the DID, in practice?

That's interesting!

And you're actually following the DID. I wonder how you present this to folks so it's understandable.

Yep. The DID is kind of like an internal UUID, so we don't have to show it to them often. The three cases off the top of my head where you'll care

1. You're setting your own domain handle, in which case you're putting it in your dns record. In this case, it'll just be that string you're sticking in the TXT record.

2. You're migrating hosts. We haven't implemented this flow yet, and since the DID will be referenced in your data export you may not even be aware of it in this case.

3. You're a developer

The case I found more worrisome is you follow someone, they then start using a new domain, and now it seems you're following a different handle (IDK if handles are immutable in Twitter, maybe they are not?).

Maybe BlueSky could offer a registrar that would do steps 1 & 2 for you transparently upon domain purchase.

You can change your handle on Twitter, but it's not recommended if you have any "follow me on Twitter @soAndSo" links out in the wild, because it opens people to handle squatters taking your old handle.

Ah sure, that could be confusing -- though I believe Twitter allows you to change your handle as well. We could probably try to let people know when a handle changes, but we'll wait to see if it causes a problem before we get into it.

Ideally you could use the domain as a (vanity) pointer to an immutable handle and when someone follows the domain they'd actually be following an immutable identity that's a combination of the domain + immutable handle which reference each other.

    example.com <--> ryan29-abcdef

I was trying to explain how I'd do it for a package repo a few months back.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32755618

If there is not a mapping to some sort of immutable handle, i imagine some sort of announcement in the timeline(example.com has changed their handle to example.xyz) and a history in their profile (handle = example.com 2017 to 2020-01-01. example.xyz 2020-01-01 to now) would cover it

So what, exactly, happens the moment a person’s domain is unavailable, or is transferred to a new owner? Does the account show up as the non-human-readable ID until the account owner can verify the ID with another domain? Or what?

Services will cache the mapping and probably give the old mapping until the cache gets updated. On a failed mapping, I suppose it'll fall back to the DID like you say unless we cook up a better answer.

Note: DNS already has a cache invalidation mechanism in the TTL of the DNS record. I think you’d be well advised to simply use that; i.e. just look up the domain every time, and let the DNS TTL be your caching mechanism for domain lookups.

(You’d also probably better make sure your DNS resolver uses DNSSEC validation, and that your DNS resolving code path requests it by default.)

I was more curious about what happens to the previous owners handle when a domain switches hand. Is the old handle force reset to something else? What if they haven't logged in to change it but the new owner of the domain is setting up that handle?

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