Getting a cool handle for your station on Bluesky

There is a fairly simple way to make your station's domain name your handle on Bluesky.

It’s Michi, time to take the REC bonnet off for a few minutes (in other words, statements made here are my own and not those of REC Networks until the bonnet goes back on.)

Blue skies are abound past the dense fog of Elon’s X

You may have heard about Bluesky. Bluesky is a new social network that has been taking the world by storm, especially those who do not want to deal with all of the Elon Musk drama on Twitter (which he stupidly renamed “X”).

The exodus from Twitter/X to Bluesky actually started in 2023 as Twitter had announced substantial rate limits and massive fees for developers of application programming interfaces (API) which are used to connect third party applications to Twitter.

REC uses APIs extensively to interact with organizations such as Google, the FCC as well as transit and road authorities for the various information that we provide on J1 Radio. In the past, REC had also operated APIs on behalf of J1 Radio to deliver current song, earthquake and train travel information for display on Twitter (before it was X). The non-developer friendly policy changes in the Musk era shut down all of our services, including those that provided emergency information in both the USA and Japan.

With that said, I am turning into a huge fan of the Bluesky platform. It’s not necessarily because of the politics as much as it is because of the flexibility as an end user and as a developer.

Your handle is your main social identity

Now, let’s talk about identity on the social networks. Your station’s “handle” is your key identity. The handle on most socials such as Twitter/X, Tiktok, Instagram, etc. that begins with “@” followed by your name, such as me being @michichan on Twitter/X. On Bluesky, if you sign up through the normal methods, your handle is going to be _.bsky.social. This can be pretty cumbersome. Not to mention, like the other socials, you are competing worldwide for the right handle and the one you want may already be taken by someone who squatted it or otherwise only has posted once in the past few years.

Getting a more custom handle on Bluesky

There are ways where you can have more control over your Bluesky identity and to also have a fully memorable name for your listeners because many of them already are familiar with it.

Personal Data Server is not the best way to do this

There is a method you may have seen mentioned called a “Personal Data Server” (PDS). The PDS is a dedicated server for which your message traffic is handled through. REC currently uses a PDS server which uses the domain lpfm.social from our former Mastodon server and provides me with my handle michi.lpfm.social and the REC official site rec.lpfm.social. This service must be ran on a separate server (including virtual cloud services such as Digital Ocean or Interserver VPS). While this method does have some advantages, there are methods out there that are less costly and cumbersome.

A much better way to do it - make your domain name your handle

There is a way that you can replace your _.bsky.social handle with your handle just being your station’s domain name. That’s right, the same one that you are using for your station’s website. A domain name that you are hopefully already using on the air and should be engrained in the listener’s mind.

First of all, this will only work if your organization has control of the top level domain meaning that you are paying a registrar for that domain name. Such top level domains would be like recnet.com or fmriverton.org. Now, if you are getting your web hosting from a free provider or through some other method where you do not have control of the top level domain (such as michibradley.substack.com), then this will not work out for you.

You will also need access to your station’s Domain Name Server (DNS) records as we will need to make a new entry to make this work. Your DNS may be provided by the company that provides your web hosting or through the registrar of your domain name.

First of all, sign up for Bluesky if you have not done so already and get a standard ___.bsky.social handle to start. If you wish to, you may set up your profile, avatar picture, etc. Your station may already have a Bluesky presence.

Step by Step - let’s do this!

(1) Log into the web-based Bluesky site https://bsky.app.

(2) Click on “Settings”.

(3) Scroll down and then click on “Change Handle”. When you click on that, a pop-up will appear.

(4) On this, click the link “I have my own domain”.

When you click on that, you will see a screen that looks something like this:

(5) When you get this popup, enter your domain name (no need to enter http://) just your domain name, such as j1hd.com.

(6) Next, with this information up, access your hosting or domain provider’s functionality to access your DNS records for that domain name. You will need to create a new TXT record in your DNS.

(7) In the host name, enter _atproto (some may require entering in the full domain afterwards, such as _atproto.j1hd.com).

(8) On the Bluesky page, click on “Copy Domain Value” and that will copy the data you need to the clipboard (it’s the same data above that after “Value:”). Paste that value into the appropriate field to put the value for that record on the DNS server page.

For example, using the above example, if you were using Digital Ocean’s DNS, this is how it would be entered:

(9) Once you save the record, wait for about 2 to 3 minutes, then go back to the popup screen in Bluesky. Click the button “Verify DNS Record”. Bluesky goes out to your DNS to look for that TXT record to validate that the request is authentic. If it can verify that record, you will get a green background message to advise that it was verified. Once verified, your handle will now change to your domain name.

(10) Start promoting the hell out of your new handle! Remember, if you do links to your Bluesky profile page, it’s https://bsky.app/profile/[your handle]). The J1HD Bluesky site can be accessed by going to https://bsky.app/profile/j1hd.com

If after doing this, you get a message stating that it is an invalid handle on your profile page where your handle should be, repeat steps (1) through (5) again and then click on “Verify DNS Record”. No need to add another TXT record in your DNS.

Optional - Additional Bluesky pages for station features

OK, you have your main identity up and running. Let’s say that you want to have a separate Bluesky account that listeners can follow for something specific such as for the weather or a morning show. You can create a additional custom handles based on your existing domain name.

Let’s say we want a separate account that will only send out information about current weather as well as severe weather forecasts but without all of the normal station promotions, etc.

Using the J1HD example above, we can assign the handle weather.j1hd.com to the additional Bluesky page.

Follow all of the steps above to sign up for a Bluesky account (there’s even a way on the settings page to establish additional accounts). At step (4) above, when entering the domain name enter the extended name you want to use, in the example we are working on, were are going to enter weather.j1hd.com. In Step (7) above, instead of just typing the host name as _atproto or _atproto.j1fm.com like you did with the main identity, include the name of next level of the handle preceded by a dot. So for the J1HD Weather example, we would put in the host name as _atproto.weather or _atproto.weather.j1hd.com. Use the value from the Bluesky popup message (it will be different than the one you originally used) and enter that into the DNS as an additional TXT record.

Like with the main account, wait about 2-3 minutes and then click on “Verify DNS Record” and if the name is verified, now you have a separate Bluesky account for your weather with a custom handle based on the station’s primary ID.

There you go! A new way to be visible!

Hopefully, this will make your station’s identity on Bluesky be memorable and authentic. All without the need for money or ass kissery in order to get the coveted blue checkmark. Your domain name is yours and there’s no better way to demonstrate the authenticity of a page than by having it directly associated with your domain name.

REC bonnet back on.

I will be looking at changes in the future to support LPFM stations with Bluesky pages through myLPFM by having a field for Bluesky pages. I will be including Bluesky as a part of my visibility search going forward for this year’s inventory. We are also looking at ways where LPFM stations may be able to use (callsign).lpfm.social for their handle if they do not have a website that involves their own domain name.

I have just finished up the first prototypes of our live playlist applications that used to exist on Twitter that sends updates when the next song comes up on each of the four J1 stations. We are dealing with a rate limiting issue right now.. but those kinds of things will not impact regular human use of the Bluesky platform.

Enjoy your time in the friendly blue skies!