The Ultimate Guide to Bluesky Marketing

What is Bluesky?

Bluesky is a decentralized, text-based social media platform allowing people to share up to 300 characters. It’s similar to how 𝕏/Twitter used to work back in the day before it was bought by Elon Musk.

Bluesky was developed in close partnership with 𝕏/Twitter’s former CEO Jack Dorsey while still at 𝕏/Twitter. This is why you will find Bluesky’s structure similar to 𝕏/Twitter’s.

Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard. 🧵

— jack (@jack) December 11, 2019

Bluesky is one of the many social media platforms that people have switched to from 𝕏/Twitter since Elon took over the company.

One of the promising features that has caught the interest of many users is its open-source nature which allows users to know exactly how the platform works as well as gives users complete ownership of their feed and audience. This is powered by the AT Protocol which was developed by Bluesky.

This mode of operation allows Bluesky not to be controlled by one company (or person) as how it is now with 𝕏/Twitter. Rather, everyone has control over the platform.

Unique Bluesky Features

1. Decentralization

Bluesky is a decentralized platform. This means that Bluesky runs on independent servers and isn’t controlled by a single server or company.

This means the decisions are not based on a single person or company, instead the decisions are made by the users of the platform

This gives users control of how the platform works, and the ability to own their audience, and moderate how the platform (feed) works.

2. Open-source

Just like Mastodon, Bluesky is also an open-source social media platform. This allows users to know what is being developed and how the platform works.

This is made possible through the AT Protocol which Bluesky runs on. The AT Protocol, as Bluesky describes it, “is a protocol for public conversation and an open-source framework for building social apps, meaning people have transparency into how it is built and what is being developed.”

3. Custom domains

It’s very rare that you find social media platforms allow their users to have custom domains as their usernames but this is possible in Bluesky.

By default, your username will be “username.bsky.social”. Example hypefury.bsky.social

But you can change your username to a custom domain if you want.

Whenever people visit the domain that you mapped to your account, they will be redirected to your Bluesky profile.

How to Create an Account on Bluesky?

1. Head over to bsky.app and click the ‘Sign up’ button.

2. On the signup page, fill in your email, password, and birthdate.

Since Bluesky is open-source, you can choose to host it on your own server and use your domain as your username.

3. In the next step, choose the handle that you want. If you’re using Bluesky as the provider, taken usernames will not work.

4. Complete the captcha to verify that you are human.

5. On the next step, upload your profile picture or create an avatar.

6. On the next page, you can choose your interests and you will start to see posts from the interests that you chose.

How to Set Up Your Custom Domain as Your Bluesky Handle?

Before we see how you can use your custom domain as your Bluesky handle, it makes sense to know why Bluesky uses domains as user handles in the first place.

Bluesky uses domains as user handles because the AT Protocol uses domains as user handles.

This is because, first, the AT Protocol powers many platforms; hence, they decided to use domains as unique identifiers so that you can have only one domain and use it across different social media platforms in the AT Protocol.

The second reason is verification. Since an organization can use its own domain, its employees can be given subdomains so other people can know and be sure that the person posting is really a representative of that organization.

Now that we know why Bluesky uses domains as user handles, we can take a look on how you can set your domain as your Bluesky handle.

First off, you need to already own a domain. Or if you don’t, Bluesky integrates with Namecheap so that you can buy a domain right inside Bluesky.

To use
1. Go to settings.

2. Scroll down and under ‘Advanced’ you select ‘Change Handle’

3. Choose ‘I have my own domain’

4. Then enter your domain and choose DNS panel

5. Now copy your domain value by clicking on the ‘Copy Domain Value’ button

6. Head over to your domain name provider and choose to manage DNS.

7. Add a new txt record with the hostname ‘_atproto’. The value should be the domain value that you copied. For the TTL, put the lowest.

8. After you’ve added the txt record, head back to Bluesky and click ‘Verify DNS Record’

If you’ve done everything correctly, your user handle will now be your domain. Keep in mind however that your old Bluesky domain will be available for other people to use