Bluesky reveals .bsky application

Bluesky CEO Toni Schneider made the surprise announcement, unsurprisingly on Bluesky, revealing they have applied for .bsky in the 2026 round of ICANN's new gTLD program. The AT-proto social network uses decentralised identifiers (DIDs) which are mapped to domain names which are then used as usernames. Users can bring their own domains (eg @roddie.digital) otherwise they are currently stuck with somewhat unwieldy subdomains of .bsky.social (eg alice.bsky.social). Assuming the gTLD is successfully delegated, Schneider hopes they can eventually offer users a second-level domain by default instead with .bsky (eg alice.bsky), potentially similar to Telegram's plans for the .gram domain*¹.

I'm not sure how many domains they already use - as an example, the post above is using a .bsky.team username instead of the default .bsky.social and is accessed through the bsky.app domain. They also run their Protocol Services site and blog at bsky.network while their old debug site is at bsky-debug.app (which still works but shows 2023 in the footer). It will be interesting to see if they plan to consolidate these all under .bsky in future.

It's nice to find out about another potential gTLD and to know its use case - it's certainly an improvement on .bsky.social but personally I find it much more interesting when people bring their own unique usernames. There are also a few services like vanity.blue which offer free third-level domains (3LDs) such as .potato.engineer and .lgbt.blue to be used for Bluesky usernames by those who want something a bit different without the cost or technical hassle of buying and configuring their own.

Some sites like Bandcamp, Itch and Neocities (which offer URLs with the username as the 3LD) also allow you to configure your .bandcamp.com, .itch.io or .neocities.org URL as your Bluesky username.

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@xan.lol, the unstoppable force behind the alternative Bluesky client, Witchsky, teased that they may introduce their own 3LDs at .witchsky.social. It seems unlikely they applied for the .wsky gTLD but I wouldn't put it past them. We will find out for certain on 07 October with ICANN's Reveal Day*².