Bluesky Blog

Domains are the ultimate identity system for building a more trustworthy internet without handing over control to some kind of verified ID scheme or being forced into publishing your personal details to gain credibility.

You can build reputation and trust using a handle, even if it's not associated with your real world identity. For example, I know that if 'ryao' replies to a question about ZFS, the response can be considered trustworthy. I don't know who that is or even what country they live in, but I know they're a contributor that isn't speculating or guessing when they reply and that's all that matters to me.

Domains can be used as verifiable, globally unique handles which simplifies things for the average user because it makes it easier to help users avoid impersonation and confusion if you can point them to something simple and verifiable. For example, look at Bluesky [1].

I've been wanting domain based namespaces and handles for a solid 5 years because it just makes sense. Here's my oldest mention of it (asking why package managers don't use domain verified namespacing) I have on HN [2]:

> It seems like a waste to me when I'm required to register a new identity for every package manager when I already have a globally unique, extremely valuable (to me), highly brandable identity that costs $8 / year to maintain.

You can tell it's old because .com domains only costed $8 back then. IMHO, domain based handles are the #1 reason to use Bluesky over X/Twitter. …

> "They're right to point out that laws like this are primarily motivated by government control of speech. On a recent Times article about the UK's Online Safety Act:"

Err, BlueSky is enthusiastically complying with that one (as you read by clicking through to their corporate statement),

> "We work with regulators around the world on child safety—for example, Bluesky follows the UK's Online Safety Act, where age checks are required only for specific content and features... Mississippi’s new law and the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) are very different. Bluesky follows the OSA in the UK. There, Bluesky is still accessible for everyone, age checks are required only for accessing certain content and features, and Bluesky does not know and does not track which UK users are under 18. Mississippi’s law, by contrast, would block everyone from accessing the site—teens and adults—unless they hand over sensitive information, and once they do, the law in Mississippi requires Bluesky to keep track of which users are children."

https://bsky.social/about/blog/08-22-2025-mississippi-hb1126

It's bold of them to attempt to shift the Overton Window in this way ("OSA is actually moderate and we should hold it up as an example of reasonableness to criticize other censorship laws against"). That happened fast.

i heard enough about bluesky from an IRL friend that i finally went to check it out and…

sorry, but it’s got all the branding of a tech startup whose employees discuss “growth hacking” with a straight face.

https://bsky.social is just a giant splash screen where it’s impossible to learn anything more about the platform before signing up. there’s an invite system, yet simultaneously it’s supposed to be decentralized? Google around and you’ll find blueskyweb.xyz with an FAQ page which talks up the decentralization angle massively. search “how would one deploy a Bluesky instance” for an hour and eventually learn that the stack is split into like four different conceptual layers with meaningless acronym names and the parts that actually matter are closed source.

so idk, until proven otherwise Bluesky is just a PR campaign promising everything to everyone and what they’ll actually deliver is a complete mystery. still, i wish they would bridge to Activity Pub so that i could peek inside without having to tie myself to it.

> (2) why would I want to leave if it's so great?

A lot of people felt burned by the changes at Twitter over the past 14 months or so. They made meaningful connections on there and with new ownership came changes that altered the character of the platform, in their eyes. But because Twitter is centralized, it's difficult to move your social graph to a new platform in a robust way.

The promise of the AT protocol is being "billionaire-proof." If Bluesky gets bought out and you don't like the new owner, you can move your entire social graph and all your posts to a new atproto service without needing permission from the old service.

That would be the nuclear option. A smaller step you could take before that is use a different set of moderation services to curate the experience you want (more info: https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-13-2023-moderation)

> Were you paid to moderate those boards?

No, none of the moderators were paid, but I do think the ~2/3 admins were paid. But yeah, I did it purely out of the want for the forum to remain high-quality, as did most of the other moderators AFAIK.

> Recent social media (& maybe "recent" no longer applies) doesn't have this kind of community run tooling

Agree, although reddit with its "every subreddit is basically its own forum but not really" (admins still delete stuff you wouldn't + vice-versa) kind of did an extreme version of community run tooling, with the obvious end result that moderation is super unequal across reddit, and opaque.

Bluesky is worth mentioning as well, with their self-proclaimed "stackable" moderation, which is kind of some fresh air in the space. https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-12-2024-stackable-moderation

Bluesky | Senior Go Engineers, Senior Machine Learning Engineers, Senior React Native Engineers, Fullstack Engineers | Remote | https://bsky.social/about/join

Bluesky is building an open internet protocol (https://atproto.com) and a flagship social app (https://bsky.app). We're a company of 30 with a strong focus on fostering a high-agency, talented team. The golang roles are focused on building the internal platform with a whole lot distributed systems engineering; the ML is working on our many recommender systems and feeds; the RN & fullstack engineers are working on the social app and internal moderation tooling, respectively.

If you think social media - and the internet - could be better, apply here: https://bsky.social/about/join