I agree with the "get your own domain" part. But I'm done with the faux decentralization of bsky and wouldn't bother with the time and maintenance investment in any of the other supposed "social media" schemes like mastodon or nostr.
Just putting up my own social network on my own domain and treating it like a blog. Whatever else social media pretends to be useful for, I'm happy to ignore.
So what, exactly, is the difference between this and internet handles? In fact, isn't this worse?
(It's because ATProto services targeted at average users are effectively centralized, which means everyone else has to put up with whatever Bluesky says or lose their access to the bulk of the network.)
To be clear, I actually think it's a good idea to let people associate their own domains with their accounts, but I find it frustrating that people act like ATProto is the only or first example of open social protocols, as this TFA does.
Or to put it another way: Not being able to recover access is not something most people will accept and if your technical security measures don't consider that they will be worked around. If people need to go through support to recover their DNS more often then support will be used to giving out access to people's account and that will also reduce YOUR actual security.
Yes, it takes hard discipline--which may lapse no matter the level of experience--to setup offsite recovery with true cryptographic secrets, but it is possible. You can say backup a KeePass file to BackBlaze, protected by a 7-word passphrase. Now all you need for recovery is access to BackBlaze (so same as a centralized service) and your memory of the passphrase, with no one but you having access.
I don't know what the stakes are for most social media accounts or websites. But wouldn't it bring some peace of mind if say Graphene's registrar couldn't just press one button to serve malware on grapheneos.org, which you won't detect until you compare the hashes with say Twitter?
Another thing with the adoption is we still see tons of major corporate/media/notable entities on there not moving their account to their domain despite having one and it giving them the more obvious "verified" impression. I dunno what's going on in some of those marketing / digital dept's that they aren't jumping to verify on the domains.
Scarce handles create urgency. People rush to sign up and claim their first name, etc. With domain-based handles, that lever disappears.
It’s one of the most common growth tactics I see by social networks launching on BetaList.
7777777phil•2mo ago