Your domain is your “internet handle”

Your personal domain is your internet handle. Dan Abramov recently coined “internet handle,” where handle means your username on a website or app, like a social media platform.

Instead of being nora95 on Twitter and Instagram and heyitsnora on TikTok (nora95 was taken, ugh) and yoganora on Strava, there’s a future where you can be @nora.net everywhere.¹

Here’s Dan:

Every time you sign up for a new social app, you have to rush to claim your username. If someone else got there first, too bad.² And that username only works on that one app anyway.

This is silly. The internet has already solved this problem.

There already exists a kind of handle that works anywhere on the internet—it’s called a domain.

I often pitch people on buying their own domain—your corner of the internet—or even gifting domains to friends and family. Domain as internet handle might be my favorite selling point yet. And it’s not just about handles. It’s about not getting trapped in someone else’s walled garden, where the rules could change at any time.

Enshittification

Cory Doctorow’s concept of Enshittification has been making the rounds lately, and for good reason. Enshittification is the process whereby a social media platform:

1. creates something good to attract users (“share photos with your friends on Instagram!”)
2. creates something good to attract businesses (“show targeted ads to Instagram users”)
3. enshittifies the platform (let’s it decay) while extracting money from both users and businesses who can’t leave because they depend on it (e.g. 10% of Meta’s 2024 revenue came from fraudulent ads - that’s $16 billion dollars (billion!) they earned by showing users ads for scammy and banned products)

Dan also describes the problem of enshittification—though he doesn’t use that terminology—in his essay, Open Social:

The web Alice created—who she follows, what she likes, what she has posted—is trapped in a box that’s owned by somebody else. To leave is to leave it behind.

On an individual level, it might not be a huge deal.

Alice can rebuild her social presence connection by connection somewhere else. Eventually she might even have the same reach as on the previous platform.

However, collectively, the net effect is that social platforms—at first, gradually, and then suddenly—turn their backs on their users. If you can’t leave without losing something important, the platform has no incentives to respect you as a user.

Maybe the app gets squeezed by investors, and every third post is an ad. Maybe it gets bought by a conglomerate that wanted to get rid of competition, and is now on life support. Maybe it runs out of funding, and your content goes down in two days. Maybe the founders get acquihired—an exciting new chapter. Maybe the app was bought by some guy, and now you’re slowly getting cooked by the algorithm.

If TikTok shuts down tomorrow, or Twitter becomes a den of vice, you cannot easily port your followers (and followed/posted/liked/etc.) to another platform. When it looked like a TikTok rug pull was imminent last year, I remember talking to a music manager friend who was justifiably worried about his artists losing their primary marketing channel overnight. It’s precarious.

Credible exit

When Elon bought Twitter, Gordon Brander wrote an essay about credible exit, which means social media platforms should exist in a way that allows us to “credibly exit” them, taking our handle and data (posts, followers, likes) with us. In other words, don’t trap us. Contrast the walled gardens of social media—where you can’t credibly exit—with how email works. Per Gordon:

Email offers credible exit for your social graph. It’s all there in your address book...so you can change between competing providers. You can even save your emails to your computer, or move them between services.

Gordon also points to the Domain Name System as credibly exit-able:

DNS offers credible exit for your domain name. You can move your files from one hosting provider to another and change the server your domain name points to. This prevents any one hosting provider from trapping its customers, and creates beneficial competition between hosting providers.

A personal website or email on your own domain give you control, but they don’t resolve your FOMO. You still probably want to participate in a social network where you can interact with your friends or lurk around your favorite actors/athletes/politicians/horologists.

Open social

The antidote to enshittification of “closed social” platforms (a.k.a. “walled gardens”) is what Dan calls open social.

He makes the case for the AT protocol as “the most convincing take on [open social] so far.”

For the uninitiated, the “AT protocol” (or atproto, for short) is the open standard behind Bluesky. If you’d like a full introduction (geared toward programmers) to why we need something like it and how it works, I insist that you spend a half hour reading Dan’s Open Social.

But for the sake of this email, the tl;dr is that atproto allows you to take your internet handle (domain) and your data (followers, posts, etc.) with you from platform to platform. So if you hang around Bluesky for a while and decide to leave—because they run out of money, run too many ads, whatever—you can bring your handle and your data with you to the next place you and your friends decide to hang out.

The AT protocol may be the most promising realization yet of domains as internet handles, but it doesn’t have to be atproto. I think domains as internet handles will happen regardless of which open standards and apps we adopt. If from the start Gmail had sold custom domains for email addresses rather than assigning @gmail.com ones, we might already be living in that world.

Btw, while some of what I’m writing about here is jargon-y, internet handle adoption won’t require technical savvy. There are neat projects like Domain Connect (another open standard!) that make setting up a domain one-click easy.

You only have one phone number

Owning your domain is like owning your phone number. When you switch carriers, you keep your handle (phone number) and your data (contacts, messages, etc). Your friends and family can still reach you. They don’t even know that you’ve switched. They don’t care.

Likewise, for your nora.net website and your n@nora.net email address, you can switch hosting providers without ostensibly changing anything, as far as the outside world is concerned. Or as Dan says, “you’re not a hostage to your hosting” (point Abramov for wordplay).

When I was in 7th grade, my Dad took me to the Verizon store to get my first cellphone—a Sony Ericsson W350i, which for some reason came pre-loaded with Fire Burning by Sean Kingston as my custom ringtone. When it came time to assign me a phone number, the store clerk said he’d “find me a good one” and spent a minute or two spinning his mouse wheel. He found a number with five 5s, and to this day when I spell out my phone number people will say, “that’s a lotta fives.”³ I’ve switched from Verizon to AT&T to T-Mobile and back to Verizon over the years, and I’ve always taken for granted that my phone number moves with me. I call and text as before, and the callers and texters on the other end are none the wiser.

Unlike your phone number, your choice of internet handle is not in the hands of the Verizon store clerk. You can be @pablo.earth or @amy.art or @lucy.food or something else entirely.

From the internet,
-@petemillspaugh.com

Footnotes

(1) Surely there exists an actual nora95, but I pulled this example out of the random name generator in my brain. So if you’re reading this, Nora, well, what a small world.

(2) My footnote, not Dan’s: Not only is the gold rush for new handles silly, it also gets financialized (unsurprisingly). Just like there is Serious Money in the secondary market for domains, there are also secondary markets for Twitter/Instagram/etc handles and even vanity phone numbers (like 1-800-GOT-JUNK). Twitter under Elon brought that market in-house, selling inactive handles for thousands to millions of dollars per handle.

(3) It happened just this week at the front desk before a yoga class. I feel a small sense of arbitrary pride when someone points it out, like I’ve just been personally complimented.