How does Handles Club work?

Handles Club purchases real domains which are then made available to use as Bluesky handles for free.

Every Bluesky account has a unique Decentralized Identifier (DID) that never changes, e.g: our @handles.club DID is did:plc:zireidav2vgfnlo2ccryuatc. A handle is a domain name that points to an account, e.g: the domain name handles.club points to did:plc:zireidav2vgfnlo2ccryuatc.

When registering a handle at Handles Club we create a link between the Bluesky account and the handle in our database using the Bluesky account’s did. The link between the handle and did remains in place forever. The database looks a little something like this:

handle	did	active
example.on.computer	did:plc:o7qbygai4phi6dxzhmyqplyh	✅
example.and.cat	did:plc:o7qbygai4phi6dxzhmyqplyh	❌

When a user sets their Bluesky handle via their Bluesky account settings, Bluesky visits a special URL to find out which Bluesky account (did) the handle belongs to. For example, if a Bluesky user tries to add example.on.computer to their Bluesky account, Bluesky will visit example.on.computer/.well-known/atproto-did. If the did returned by the URL matches the Bluesky user’s did then Bluesky will update the account’s handle.

Handles Club is powered by handles.net which provides a handle directory for every domain name. Visit the public directory for each Handles Club domain by clicking on the “registered” link for each domain on Handles Club.