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Comment by bradgessler | Hacker News Reader

The best thing about Bluesky is you can use your domain as your username. I'm @bradgessler.com on there, so if people want to "verify" me, they see something more meaningful than a blue checkbox, which is my website.

If I ever get blocked, banned, deplatformed, whatever—people would see my domain and be able to go there to determine what's going on. In a sense it's "censorship-evident".

I think this will be great for businesses—it's so much more less ambiguous if I can @example.com a business and get a response. I put a starter pack together of SaaS built on Rails that's already doing this at https://go.bsky.app/JQyXa2u

I really like what BlueSky is doing and hope it doesn't get enshitified as the future plays out. Even if it does, it seems like now is a goldilocks moment where things are feeling really good there.

I highly recommend spending the 5 minutes it takes to setup an account and point it at your domain.

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Verifying your identity on Mastodon is for everyone as well and based on open web standards.

https://joinmastodon.org/verification

Problem with Mastodon is you’re forced to associate with the identity of the sever or run your own instance, both of which are very awkward.

I’m @bradgessler@ruby.social, but I’m more than a Ruby dev.

I could run a Mastadon instance for bradgessler.com, but I have no desire to spend even 3 minutes figuring out how to set all that up. Maintaining my own instance sounds even worse.

Bluesky gets the ergonomics of this right: the usernames feel like they occupy a global namespace and I can point the aliases at my domains in a few minutes without having to worry about a bunch of standards that I don’t really care about.

For some reason I can’t explain, it also really bothers me that I have to @ people on Mastadon via @brad@bradgessler.com. I don’t want to say “@“ twice if I’m verbally telling somebody where to find me when presenting and “@me@bradgessler” is weird too. Much easier to say “Follow me @bradgessler.com”

Am I lazy? Yes, but most people are. Bluesky strikes a nice balance of control and identity that I’m comfortable with for the amount of time and effort I’m willing to put into it.

It's possible to set up a Mastodon alias using WebFinger: https://domenicoluciani.com/2022/11/19/how-to-create-mastodo...

Maybe think about people who (deliberately or not) have neither chosen their domain(s) to read like their real name or online handle. I agree that yours kinda works, but I wouldn't want to be addressed by @<any of my domains>, that's why I use a handle (and have not chosen a matching domain since 1999 or so). And yes, I know you don't have to go that route, and I actually like that it works, I'm just saying it's not a universally good feature. It can be pretty useless.

Neat thing about BlueSky using DNS TXT record is I don't actually have to host a landing page. The way mastodon does it feels like a quid pro quo way of making you put a mastodon icon on your website. Bluesky is really good for corporate and government users who can get an @name.whitehouse.gov account or @name.npr.org etc without polluting the npr.org markup with a thousand "rel" links for each of their employees. I think bluesky is thinking about a different audience than mastodon.

Also I took a look at https://mastodonapp.uk/@stephenfry as an example of a verified profile and the UX is quite bad. Green check in a green box with a green border. The title tag just says "Website" and there's no indication of what it means.

The default handles (ending in .bsky.social) you get from signing up also redirect to your profile on bsky.app by default. Even if someone has no idea what bluesky is, they can load up that URL (even with the @) and be looking at your social profile right away.

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