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They can have it. It’s just a string in a database and doesn’t represent me the way a custom handle does. Impersonation is futile that way.

sure it's probably not a huge problem now, but it will be for people with lots of followers with a lot of links that officially point to the old account.

Gotcha. Although the same is true on any other platform. Changing a handle makes it available for anyone else. So this isn’t a new issue.

That seems … less than ideal.

This is a bug. I recommend to squat it using one of your own invites. Tumblr allows to keep both.

And I’ve done this.

If only I had my own invites.

Really? Is there a way to reserve both usernames without creating two accounts? That sounds like a problem for impersonation

not that I can tell at the moment. probably less of a problem while the social network is small, but definitely could be an impersonation problem as the network grows.

There was good discussion on allowing multiple domains and reserving domain equal to length of time it was active and also never letting custom domains go as long as it's verified and owned etc.

I think the goal is that there are several big domains not only .bsky.social and that ppl look at the whole domain as the user identity rather than assume mike or tom is the same person across all domains?

Yeah but say you move to workplace domain and want to go back and you don't have it available. There's definitely been discussion here on multiple domains and retention policies.

One consequence of this might be that if you get a big following with a bsky dot social domain and have concerns about impersonation, you might not really feel able to switch to custom domain

I’m not sure this will be too overly big a problem. Bsky Social, even if considered a namespace (it’s just a federated server) will become the Gmail address of the Internet. People’s unique handles will be tied to the complete address used to identify themselves. Also the at mentions all update.

okay sure but if I use @amk.bsky.social for years, cultivate a million followers and then move my handle, all the references to my handle that are all over the place are now wrong. it matters less when it's new, but makes it hard to change handles as the system grows.

The references on the AT protocol should, if I have read the spec correctly, all auto-update to your new handle. But, yeah, non AT protocol references and even external links would break. Sounds like a problem that the team should solve with pointer accounts. Or similar.