[derektank]

I don't even think it's the technical barriers per se that makes people distrust domain names as a form of verification. I think the idea of competing sources of truth creates some uncomfortable cognitive dissonance for a large number of people which drives the demand you identified for a central authority.

[lxgr]

But domains could be that central authority, in a way that regular "verified names" can't be.

With social media handles, it's the eternal game of finding something that's available everywhere, or doing the awkward dance of "i'm @foo (except for platforms B and C, where i'm @_foo)".

I wonder if there is a future for a service mapping domains to human-interpretable names, though?

[verdverm]

Both domain and non-domain, or 3rd party, based verifiers have a trust relationship, which can be undermined by breaking the expectations. Musk Social certainly did this when they made it pay-to-play and removed the blue check on well known accounts the overlord became displeased with.

ATProto specifically advises against shortening domains into some "human readable" format. For example, @foo.bar.com and @foo.baz.com could easily look the same. The full path is unique. What Bluesky provides is a "display name" in addition to your handle. Multiple people can have the same display name, but it always appears next to the full handle

https://atproto.com/specs/handle#usage-and-implementation-gu...

[madeofpalk]

except what makes lxgr.dev authoritative over lxgr.net?

How does… Movie Star get an authoritative domain that people can trust?

[lxgr]

Since I'm not a celebrity, one is as authoritative as the other :)

But one of them I can receive email on and it also hosts my blog, and if I wanted to, I could reference it here in my bio, just like how people do it for "non-self-custodial" social media identities.

It's not perfect, but at least it works across services for regular people without any risk of "handle sniping" once a new service becomes popular. (I suspect that for regular social networks, different rules apply to celebrities than to regular people.)

And for companies, there's always trademark law, which is already heavily integrated into the domain registry framework: Also not perfect, but definitely better than replicating the same solution to n services/sites.