Remember Twitter’s blue checkmark? For a while, having one attached to your Twitter handle signified that you were notable or famous in some way. Twitter granted them sparingly.
Then, as Twitter became X, the checkmarks became something of a profit center. You could pay a fee to Xitter to add a checkmark to your identity, which would verify that the account did belong to you. The checkmark effectively became an identity verification tool, although there were some scammers out there who bought verification checkmarks to impersonate real people.
Also: 7 Bluesky settings tweaks that make the popular X alternative even better
Bluesky, the most recent popular Twitter alternative entrant, also offers identity verification, and the way the upstart social network is doing verification appears to have some legs — sort of.
What Bluesky is doing is tying your existing domain to your Bluesky handle. I’ll use mine as an example. Right now (at the beginning of this article, before I do the upcoming hands-on demonstration), my Bluesky handle is @davidgewirtz.bsky.social. It’s okay, but it’s not nearly as snappy as @davidgewirtz.com.
Take a quick note of my bsky.social handle and also the number of followers, which right now is 947. We’ll come back to this profile page near the end of the article.
I own the domain name davidgewirtz.com, which links to my somewhat out-of-date personal home page. As the owner of that domain, I’m able to tweak its settings, adding custom codes that Bluesky provides. Once Bluesky detects those custom codes, it will change my handle to @davidgewirtz.
Also: How to register a domain for your website
The thing is, if I didn’t own the domain, I couldn’t make the changes. That’s how Bluesky implements its verification. Of course, if I didn’t already own that domain, someone else might decide to buy it and use it as their Bluesky handle.
That’s what I meant by Bluesky’s verification being sound, but only sort of. It entirely relies on whether or not you own the domain you want to use as your handle. So if someone domain squats on your desired domain name, then you can’t be verified using that domain.
It’s not perfect, but it’s not a bad start.
If you don’t already have a domain name
If you don’t already have a domain name you want to use as your handle, you can point your browser to https://account.bsky.app/user/domains and Bluesky will register one for you. This is done in concert with Namecheap.
I already have the domain davidgewirtz.com, so there’s no need to take this all the way through that part of the process. But to demonstrate the basics, I typed in mycustomdomain.social, and hit return. Here’s what came back.
Choose a domain, pay the fee, and all will be handled automatically. Beware, however. It looks like Namecheap/Bluesky practices the same bait-and-switch that most hosting providers do. The first year pricing is fairly reasonable, but the pricing in subsequent years goes up mightily.
In the case of mycustomdomain.social, the first year’s registration is priced at $9.98. But subsequent years will set you back $41.97 per year, a 4.2x price increase!
Also: 8 Bluesky tips every new user should know
Many vendors that offer products with high switching costs tend to perpetrate this practice. But not all. I strongly recommend you shop around. I also recommend you look very carefully at any price you’re quoted, whether you’re buying domain names or hosting services, to make sure you understand just how onerous the fees for subsequent years will be.
If you already have a domain name
For this demonstration, we’ll assume you already have a domain name, as I do. Once you get the appropriate codes from Bluesky (we’ll do that in a minute), you’ll need to change your domain records, also called a zone file.
Domain records are typically located in either of two places: your domain registrar or your hosting provider. The way this works is the domain lookup system first looks for a name server. You specify your name server with your domain registrar. The name server could be operated by the registrar or by any other server entity. Usually, though, that other server entity will be your hosting provider.
In my case, davidgewirtz.com uses the hosting provider’s name server. GoDaddy is the domain registrar. As you can see below, GoDaddy can’t show me the DNS (domain name system) records because the name server is operated by my hosting provider, not by GoDaddy.
Instead, I have to go to my hosting provider’s cPanel. cPanel is a common dashboard used by hosting providers, but it’s not universal. I’m showing you the cPanel process, but if your host uses something different, look for similar features.
If all else fails, contact your host’s support team. Answering DNS questions is something all hosting teams are trained to do because you can’t start using their product until DNS is set up. So they’re motivated to know this stuff.
Also: How to migrate from X to Bluesky without losing your followers
If you have no access to your hosting panel at all, you can still get a custom Bluesky domain. You’ll need to upload a custom text file to a hidden folder you create on your website using FTP. I’m not going to go into using FTP to send files to your website, but if that confuses you there are a ton of tutorials out there.
In my case, I’ve scrolled to the Domains section of cPanel and clicked Zone Editor. This button might also be called DNS Records, or some variant of that.
I operate a lot of domains on this hosting provider. But the one I’m concerned with right now is davidgewirtz.com. Clicking Manage will take me to the records page, which is where I’ll need to make changes for Bluesky.
This page looks daunting, especially since it scrolls down for a long time, with a lot of options. But it’s actually very simple. It’s just a table with a few fields. The name field tells the DNS what chunk of text it’s going to be interpreting. That’s the public-facing address.
The TTL (time to live) field tells the DNS how long to use this record before downloading an update. TTL is measured in seconds, so 14400 seconds is about 4 hours. 3600 seconds is an hour. In other words, if you make a change, wait an hour or four hours and it’s likely to be propagated to other servers.
Also: How to manage Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads all from one free app
The type field tells the DNS what kind of data is being stored. A is for an IP address, MX is the mail exchanger (how mail is mapped to your domain), CNAME is a string containing a domain, and TXT is just about any text you want. Bluesky will use TXT to have you insert a custom piece of text that it can verify.
And with that, let’s go back to Bluesky
Setting up your already-owned domain in Bluesky
To set up your domain in Bluesky, click Settings and then Account.
Then click Handle.
Here’s where you need to pay some careful attention. Click the “I have my own domain” button. Don’t click anything inside the red box I so helpfully placed on this screenshot for you.
Next, you’ll continue the process. Note that I’ve typed in my davidgewirtz.com domain. Also notice there are two buttons: DNS Panel and No DNS Panel. In the following screenshot, I’ve clicked No DNS Panel. Note that it wants a file uploaded to a folder on my website containing a sequence of characters. That’s how you do it if you don’t have access to your Zone file or DNS records.
In my case, I do have DNS panel access, so I clicked the DNS Panel button. Notice that there are three values provided that I need to paste into my DNS panel. Host is the same as name on my panel, then TXT (which we talked about before) and then Value, which is a string of characters.
So, I switched back to my hosting provider’s zone file editor and clicked Add Record. Using Bluesky’s helpful little copy button, I pasted in the values provided. I also set TTL to 3600 because I’m an impatient boy and an hour seems better than four hours.
Then, hoping I didn’t just completely nuke my Bluesky presence, I clicked Save. My hosting provider confirmed that I successfully saved the record, so now it’s back to Bluesky. That same dialog remained on the screen, but this time, I clicked the blue Verify DNS Record button.
I got back a very satisfying green check that confirmed that my domain had been verified. Now it’s time to change my handle on Bluesky by clicking the blue update button. And yes, I’m still a bit nervous.
Well, that was anticlimactic. I was sent back to the Account screen. To see if anything happened, I’m switching to the Profile page. And there we are. My handle is now @davidgewirtz.com.
But what about davidgewirtz.bsky.social?
Up until recently, your old handle would be freed up. According to TechCrunch, Bluesky now apparently reserves your old bsky.social username if you change your account to a domain. The article doesn’t say whether users will be redirected or not, so you may still want to follow the guidelines of this article: If you convert to a domain name on Bluesky, you MUST do this right away
Also: Bluesky is teeming with researchers – here’s why
But at least Bluesky seems to have put some safeguards in place for old-handle hijacking. Keep in mind, however, that there are no protections for someone going to a domain registrar and reserving your name as a domain. It’s a good idea to register your name as a domain.
So there you go. Do you plan to change your Bluesky handle to your domain? Are you currently using Bluesky? What do you think of the service? Let us know in the comments below.
You can follow my day-to-day project updates on social media. Be sure to subscribe to my weekly update newsletter, and follow me on Twitter/X at @DavidGewirtz, on Facebook at Facebook.com/DavidGewirtz, on Instagram at Instagram.com/DavidGewirtz, and on YouTube at YouTube.com/DavidGewirtzTV.
Source: Robotics - zdnet.com
