Purchase and manage domains directly through Bluesky

Unnecessary, pointless, expensive features are precisely how you define the inverse of the original Twitter vision.<p>Bare minimum but fast message passing as a social communication layer.<p>If all of these new platforms are trying to become a better or more bloated version of <i>what Twitter has become</i>, then they will never catch on like the viral tool that Twitter originally was.<p>None of them learned the lesson of google wave, it seems. (i.e. look at these really cool features and extensions, this is what you want right?)

I must say, the number of people in here saying bluesky is dead because of Threads&#x27; overnight growth is surprising and upsetting. Believing all that matters is how fast they get users is hugely missing the point. Bluesky has been taking their time in order to get things right--and getting certain things right is very important. Twitter already exists; we need alternatives because things were handled wrong.<p>For example, Bluesky right now is ironing out a fairly novel moderation system. They are doing this not only transparently, but with the input and active involvement of the users. This takes time and it is also wise to complete moderation systems before opening the app up to everyone. Ineffective (or nonexistent?!) moderation systems are one of the biggest issues people have with many&#x2F;most platforms including Twitter, and it is more important that they get it right than they get a zillion users overnight.<p>Crowning whichever one can &quot;move faster and break things&quot; as the winner is the wrong approach, and demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding about the problems plaguing Twitter and other platforms.<p>Honestly, Threads and Bluesky are barely comparable given how different they are philosophically and on a lot of very fundamental levels.

I can’t wait to read the tell all book about Bluesky during this three day period when Threads hits a hundred million users and Bluesky makes the most important strategic decision of its existence.

Cool....<p>This is the type of feature &#x2F; partnership you build in year 5, not pre-launch.<p>Wouldn&#x27;t it be better to focus on features and scalability needed for opening up the network to more users to build the network beyond a beta phase or adding core features to the app?

Looks great. But maybe the effort should be going towards scaling up so they can remove the invite only requirement, Threads is going to actively eat Bluesky’s lunch while it remains.

The dirty little secret about Bluesky is that it&#x27;s actually pretty goddamn great on the inside. I have never in my life had normals asking for a social media invite, but I currently have a list of fourteen people waiting for a code.<p>It works, feels, tastes, shares, and functions like Classic Twitter without the waves of repugnant users or miserably overbaked features. Collaborative mute lists make screening out horseshit easy. Shit stays put and is there when you return to the app. The timeline is hard chronological and the utter lack of ads is delightful. Hashtag hash is not missed. Everything just works with a modicum of taste to boot.<p>Threads is not an equivalent product.

Bluesky trying to go the way of Clubhouse with their invite-only clownshow

Bluesky is dead.<p>Nobody is going to move again. They had the chance of outrun threads but slept on it.<p>Whatever they release now, will never get initial users to get it off ground.

Lot of negative comments here but IMO this is huge. The best way to keep anything commercial good in the long term is competition, and the only way to have competition with web services is if users can go somewhere else, which requires a portable identity&#x2F;username and open protocols. Bluesky is currently the only platform offering both in a convenient package. Even Mastodon doesn&#x27;t make it this easy[0].<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mastodon&#x2F;mastodon&#x2F;issues&#x2F;2668">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mastodon&#x2F;mastodon&#x2F;issues&#x2F;2668</a>

Ideologically these Twitter exodus communities will become even more microcosmic than the presumed &quot;alt-right, redpilled&quot; ideology they purport to escape. Twitter may be these things in part, but by being a direct reaction away from these things, the new networks will become necessarily <i>more</i> niche and specialized ideologically.<p>In the same way that the ideological specialization of Twitter is not helpful for its growth, these new networks will be likewise more of an echo-chamber, and regardless of the &quot;correctness&quot; of their ideology, the unilaterality of it will starve it of the multifaceted discourse which provides the &quot;town square&quot; functionality which is core to these platforms&#x27; ethos.

Have you all considered that the VC-backed winner-take-all model of one platform left standing does not have to be the way?<p>Threads for the status-seekers Spill for hip folks Truth Social for alt-right Bluesky for the cozy web Mastodon for the true geeks<p>So on and so on...and that&#x27;s a good thing.

They better hurry up if they want to be relevant. Time to ship garbage!

Bluesky is going down the VC path, and we all know how this ends ups for social media companies. Sure, they&#x27;ll try to monetize without ads. But it&#x27;s unclear to me what kind of revenue stream would generate enough cash. Sure as hell it won&#x27;t be this Namecheap thing.<p>In my opinion, the only way to go for a social media company is to be a non-profit.

Namecheap is the worst company possible for this, because it&#x27;s trivial to trick them into removing domains. Here&#x27;s a reminder that a troll managed to get them to remove domains, through Twitter, by claiming that they were run by Russians.

Somewhat unrelated, but blueskyweb.xyz is the ugliest domain name I&#x27;ve ever seen for a legitimate tech company. Feels like a spam domain.

I don&#x27;t understand the emphasis on &quot;identity management&quot; or &quot;account portability&quot;. It has from the beginning been the single justification I have heard from the atproto people for reinventing the ActivityPub wheel.<p>One thing that is <i>good</i> about the internet has always been that nobody needs to know you&#x27;re a dog. That you can move between worlds <i>and</i> identities as much as you want. That there is a hard break between my identity, and my social media accounts. I don&#x27;t want a social security number on the internet!<p>This push here to decentralize oddly seems to amount to a kind of centralization of the one thing regular users probably dont want centralized! People like having alts, characters, fungible and plural accounts. Atproto argues that, in fact, this a problem to solve, and enough of one to justify creating an entire protocol to compete with activitypub. I am just not convinced of that pitch.

Could be a huge boon to the self-hosted movement, might reach the critical mass of users that are willing to fund open source development of self-hosted cloud, just BYO domain

i&#x27;ve been following art communities on twitter, and while threads have indeed taken off massively, there&#x27;s still a surprising amount of interest on bluesky, and there are people who are joining both, even after threads&#x27; opening up. there are several anecdotes of people not liking threads because of its corporate cleanliness.<p>so no, bluesky isn&#x27;t as dead as you may think. if anything it&#x27;s gonna be as big as mastodon, as much as it pains me to say that as a fediverse advocate.

I just want auto-renew to work properly sometimes it works sometimes it doesn&#x27;t, lost a couple of high value domain names even tho they&#x27;ve had my CC for years.

It is always a little bit bizarre to see things like this. Domains are generally for organisations, for good reason: they cost money to acquire, they&#x27;re globally unique, and they cost money to run.<p>Identity is a funny thing, and certainly online it is ambiguous because most of us think of it as being in some way absolute: we have our identities regardless of context, and we want our technology to reflect that.<p>I&#x27;d argue in reality our identities are functions of association. Groups we&#x27;re part of, etc. Online identity as-is is like that, but with a feudal relationship between the &quot;domain administrators&quot; and the people who associate with them.<p>The right answer isn&#x27;t to atomise identity (that&#x27;s technically pretty hard to do anyway) but to make those identity-and-means-of-communication hosts into bonafide associations, owned by their members, operated for their benefit, and operated as constitutional democracies with rights to protect minorities and elections to the organisation&#x27;s board, committees, or key executive positions.<p>We in tech need to get past the idea that the social problems that have emerged from the internet have technical solutions. Maybe some do, but the vast majority do not.

This makes it a tiny bit more like app.net. Not in terms of control but in terms of floating the idea of paying an annual subscription fee.

Bluesky is currently better than threads, technically.<p>The content on Bluesky is lacking, i know it’s because of the invite only system, and that has its advantages and disadvantages but Bluesky is going to run into a problem soon.<p>They obviously need content and users to stay alive, and the content is lacking. Currently it’s a very niche group of users who have a very distinct culture. They don’t leave much room for differing ideas.<p>It will be interesting watching this play out. They are positioned in a way that can beat threads, but they need to drop the invite ASAP and manage their onboarding of new users.<p>That means the culture will inevitably change, I’m not sure I see a way of it staying the same as normal people and more fringe people sign up.<p>IMO they should prioritize content creators. Engaging content on the platform that’s rich will be a huge leg up when they open up.<p>Helps too that currently i can’t even post a picture on threads without it crashing. Blue sky is definitely the more delightful sop to use.

I don&#x27;t get the argument that scaling is harder for startups than for Big Tech.<p>1. At Meta, you had to use internal &quot;approved&quot; tooling to build you product. which is far worse than products in open market. BlueSky can put it all on serverless like AWS Lambda and call it a day.<p>2. If funds are an issue, then raise more. There&#x27;s no way around it. you had to scale sometime. Even if you optimise well, you&#x27;ll still burn a huge amount supporting free users.<p>3. Threads was built by 10 Engineers. A simple MVP shouldn&#x27;t have a massive team behind it anyways.<p>I feel the founders are largely responsible for not having their priorities sorted out.

When are we going to be able to USE BlueSky..? Looks like Meta has beaten Jack to the Punch and released their Twitter replacement... Who&#x27;s to say anyone will wanna use BSky once people are integrated into Threads

Somehow, this BlueSky reminds me of Okuna(previously Open.social). It was invite only, very enthusiastic community iniviting only handful sane(non-ar<i>eh</i>le) people and everyone was suggesting good features. Founders were committed to non-ad revenue via various premium features etc… and then slowly community died down slowly, posts stopped, early users inactive for months and one day it just closed door with a small message that it is hard to build social network etc etc…<p>I hope BlueSky doesn’t go in the way of Okuna(and lot of similar ones before it).

This all seems to be missing the point. What does using DNS for your identity do for your actual data? Your data is still going to be on whichever platform you log on to, and otherwise wouldn&#x27;t we want to be able to make a unique ID for each service?<p>Really, if you want a consistent, permanent ID, we might as well use our government IDs everywhere...

Thats cool and all, but give me my invite already. Been on the waitlist since they first announced last year and still waiting for it till this day.<p>I&#x27;ve tried the selfhostable pds and its definitely looking good, the ability to selfhost our data ourselves. Plus like the article promoted, the ability to link username to our own domain name.

From the blog post:<p>&gt; Bluesky offers an additional layer of privacy protection by acting as your domain registrar agent. We do not register your personal information with the WHOIS directory, which is a searchable database that holds information on domain ownership.<p>So is Bluesky the registrant of these domains, not the end-user?

I&#x27;m weary of tying my domain registrar to social media. One of the nice things about owning my domain is that I can control it -- if I get banned on bluesky, a much more likely occurrence than CloudFlare kicking me out, what&#x27;s the policy of transferring out?

I didn’t really understand the domain thing when I signed up with my invite. After that I never used it again.<p>Honestly all these social media apps like Twitter suck. I never used Twitter nor social media much, probably won’t change.<p>Personally, I’m out. Y’all have fun and enjoy.

lol, and I thought Mastodon was a conspiracy by Big Janky Off-Brand Domain Name.<p>but really, Bluesky users have spent the past two months going wild with novelty domain names. You can pay $1 for the first year for all manner of stupid funny names, and people do.<p>For anyone here that would be easy - but for non-techies you can see the use case for a service that does it for them.<p>This really is just providing a convenient service that this specific userbase demonstrably wants.<p>If anyone else wanted to do the same they could, nobody&#x27;s stopping you. But this is an actual service for Bluesky&#x27;s users.

Can anyone answer me this, where is the funding for bluesky coming from?

This looks interesting, but it seems like it would lead to some pretty long and cumbersome user names. It also doesn’t address the problem of the moment: everyone who was itching to leave Twitter already have a place to go and based on Thread’s sign-ups, they are already moving in large numbers. Are most people going to want to move again whenever Bluesky opens its gates? I think the answer is no, unless Meta&#x2F;Threads really screws something up. Threads isn’t great, but it’s …adequate and likely will improve quickly. That might be good enough for most people.

One concern: suppose Bluesky does take off - isn&#x27;t that going to compound the existing problem with domaining?

Just want to know how they&#x27;ll bend to coercion from governments

Power move, Bluesky launches now in EU with open signups.

Paying for a username, lol. Bluesky will take off any minute bros!

What’s exactly the benefit of this other than making the domain space more toxic than it already is with parking, squatting, etc?

Is Bluesky a Threads clone?

I’m not positive this is a winner for normie users. The exclusivity of a user name is important, I want @mark, not @mark.abcdef while I know there is an @mark.abcdęf out there.