| > instead they want to see a name and a check mark How is that remotely surprising? Most famous people are not known by domain names. Most are known by their real names. Some are known by usernames on particular services, like MrBeast on YouTube or dril on Twitter. Maybe, if Bluesky stays popular, a new crop of Internet-famous people will be known by their domain names. But even then, you're probably not going to remember whether they're foo.com or foo.io or foo.bsky.social. Some people, mostly in tech, do have well-known personal websites hosted at their own domains – but I for one rarely remember the specific domains, because I'm used to finding websites through search. (Off the top of my head I can only think of cr.yp.to.) Companies are more likely to have websites and well-known domains, so there's that, but most social media users are individuals. Besides, domain names are not more owned than Twitter handles or any other kind of username. If anything, they're less owned. When Elon Musk stole some people's Twitter handles, it was (tech) news. The expectation with most services is that you can register a name and hold onto it forever for free; at worst it might be lost if you're totally inactive for a long time. Meanwhile, domains require yearly payment. Once they expire, they're often instantly snapped up by a bot with no way for the original owner to get them back. So in practice, people lose their personal domains all the time. Less common for companies, but companies do tend to let their names expire when they go out of business. Just the other day there was a front-page post about using this to hijack people's identities. [1] Domain names can also be taken away for trademark infringement (UDRP) or by a court for other legal reasons (e.g. pirate sites often have their domains seized). Domains can be lost for political reasons, as with .af domains suspended last year [2] following the change of government in Afghanistan (originally thought to be caused by the message expressed by the names, in reality caused by payment issues resulting from economic sanctions, but either way happening for political reasons). You even have situations like .io where millions of domains might disappear in one stroke (though it probably won't actually happen). [1] https://trufflesecurity.com/blog/millions-at-risk-due-to-goo... [2] https://www.reuters.com/technology/brokeaf-goes-offline-afgh... |