Internet Handle

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. 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. A domain is a name you can own on the internet, like wikipedia.org or google.com.

Most creators on the internet today don’t own a domain. Why not? Until recently, you could only use a domain for a website or custom email. But personal websites have mostly fallen out of fashion, and each social app sports its own kind of handles.

However, open social apps are starting to change that. These apps let you use any internet domain you own as a handle:

You don’t have to squat handles anymore. Own a domain, and you can log into any open social app—now or in the future—and your profile is already there. Multiple apps, one identity.

And who knows, maybe one day you’ll put a website there too.

# What about your data?

Today, most apps trap your posts and follows inside. If the app shuts down, they’re gone. If you want to leave, you start over.

This doesn’t make sense. The web we create should be ours.

Thankfully, open social apps fix that too. On the surface, they might not look too different from the apps you’ve used before. But under the hood, they keep everything you create—all your posts, your follows, your likes, your recipes—in a single place that you control. This place is called your hosting. It’s like a dropbox for your socials with everything you’ve ever created.

If an open social app shuts down, everything you created with it still lives on as data at your hosting. Other developers can make new apps to display that data, or remix it in new ways.

Your data belongs to you; social apps just read and write it.

# This isn't theoretical. This is exactly how Bluesky, Tangled, Leaflet, and other open social apps already work today. The technology that makes this possible is called the AT protocol.

As more social apps support the AT (pronounced “at” like @) protocol, you’ll be able to log into them with your domain—in a sense, your “internet handle”—and own the web you create.

Should you care? Actually, that’s up to you.

# How do you get started?

Some open social apps, such as Bluesky and Tangled, set you up with a free domain and open social hosting when you sign up. You might not have realized that, but if you sign up on one of those services, the username you get is a domain, such as you.bsky.social. That’s an internet handle right there!

You can then switch to your own domain later, or move to a different hosting. Handle and hosting are independent from each other, and from the apps you use. You can also self-host.

Changing your handle or your hosting doesn't break any apps.

# The AT protocol ecosystem is just getting started. One day it might become a web standard, but for now much of it is propelled by a small community of stubborn enthusiasts.

There is no single agreed-upon way to refer to an AT identity—some apps might say “log in with AT handle”, others “log in with ATProto”, and so on. No single entity is in charge. Much like the web it builds upon, the Atmosphere is what we make of it. (That term itself was some person’s idea, and it has stuck.)

I personally like “log in with your internet handle”, but then I’d have to explain what it is. This website exists to do just that.

If you found this page useful, you’re welcome to link to it from your app or article. If you don’t, that’s also cool. I mostly made this for myself. Well—and because the domain was available.

Thank you for reading!