Until trademark laws come into play, and you find yourself obligated by law to give up your domain username to a big corporation. (A famous example in France is “Milka vs. Kraft Foods”, the court favored the big corporation’s registered trademark over Mrs Milka’s name.)

Granted, my comment doesn’t add much to the discussion, since this domain ownership issue would have been a problem in ActivityPub too.

Seems still better than the current status quo, where twitter can just decide to give your handle to kraft because they feel like it.

At least there's already a relatively established dispute mechanism for domains.

> Until trademark laws come into play, and you find yourself obligated by law to give up your domain username to a big corporation.

This wouldn't be a big deal in practice (besides losing the domain). Domain usernames are just the combo of you telling Bluesky "I intend to use this domain name" and then you placing a TXT record on the domain to prove you own it. If you want to change domains (or, are forced to), you just give them the new domain name and you set another TXT record (just like if you had set up a domain name as a username for the first time). The underlying DID is still yours.

Didn't GitHub or Twitter or someone force someone to give up @Kik or similar?

That was npm, which lead to a left-pad incident.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11349870 - Kik, left-pad, and npm (2016)

No, npm themselves chose to take the name away from someone and give it to someone else.

That's also not how atproto domain usernames are implemented.

The identity is just a public key, basically. There's a resolution service which uses domains, but you can move the identity, with all the data, to another one.

This is not a problem because the atproto has true account portability, so your domain getting seized is not the end of the world, unlike in activitypub.

Well, now it's up to the person who owns milka.fr so if it's kraft... No issue. If this isn't and they complain, it has to go to litigation. And one would think that they own a domain for their products already so it should be all good.