Bluesky social network

Many people will already have noticed that an alternative to Twitter / X has been on the rise in recent months. After the experience with Twitter, where this is often seen in a negative light, many people are switching to this service. In this blog post, we want to discuss what the differences are and how you can use your own domain name as a handle on Bluesky.

What is Bluesky?

Bluesky reached the milestone of 13 million users last month, so they're well on their way to becoming a popular platform. What they're doing differently is decentralizing the network and welcoming publishers and software developers. A blog post features a number of testimonials from users talking about their successes with Bluesky.

What makes Bluesky different?

Bluesky is a social network designed not to be controlled by a single company. The platform takes a decentralized approach, where the social media is developed by a variety of individuals and organizations, but still provides a cohesive and user-friendly experience.

This is made possible through the use of the AT protocol, an open source toolkit that enables the development of social applications that can communicate with each other. The idea behind Bluesky is to make modern social media and public online conversations more reminiscent of the early days of the internet. Back then, it was easy to start a blog or follow multiple blogs via RSS. Bluesky hopes to unleash a new era of experimentation and innovation in social media. It will give researchers, communities and developers more freedom to solve existing social networking challenges and discover new forms of interaction.

Why decentralization?

Traditional social networks such as Twitter or X are often closed platforms managed by a central authority. Only a small group of people have full control over how users can use the platform and what developers can develop.

This comes with some major disadvantages: As a user: When you leave a platform, you often lose the network you've built and the content you've created.

As a developer: When you develop new applications, you have to completely rebuild the social network.



There is also the risk of being deprived of access to the platform's APIs, which can lead to an abrupt end to your project. As a creator: Years of building an audience can be undermined by a change in the platform's rules or guidelines. Bluesky seeks to break through these limitations by providing an open ecosystem where users and developers have more control and flexibility.

Advantages of Bluesky

So Bluesky has some big advantages over X, the biggest being that there is no penalty if you share a link within your posts. This can therefore be an attractive advantage for SEO and publishers over X, which prefers not to see posts with outbound links in order to keep people on the platform. In addition, follower and user engagement is reported to be up to three to four times higher on shared content compared to other social media platforms. The biggest trend in recent years is that social media is often not penetrated by start-up companies and websites, and even with a lot of interaction within the network, this results in little traffic to one's website.

This shows the importance of social media platforms that want to keep a visitor on the platform for as long as possible. Bluesky also shows that even with few followers, interaction can be much more valuable. And this is how traffic actually flows to your website. That, of course, is the purpose of social media for publishers and companies.

Adapt the Bluesky handle to your own domain name

Within Bluesky you can also change the handle or username to your own domain name, this can also be changed for an existing account in the meantime.

You can do this by logging into both our customer panel and Bluesky and navigating to Settings -> Account -> Handle and selecting I have my own domain. You can then change this to your own domain name and add the DNS record to your DNS records in the hosting of MijnHostingPartner.nl. You can then add the record in the following way.

Once you have added the record to your DNS records at MijnHostingPartner.nl, it will be available after a few minutes, depending on your domain name extension it may take several hours before it is picked up.

In our test with a .com domain, this could already be verified within 10 minutes. Your own domain name is then available and will be changed immediately under your profile, which of course looks a bit more professional than the free domain from Bluesky or another provider. For an account that you use for business purposes, it is therefore highly recommended to change this.