.socialmedia · Chapter 03 of 9 · The handle problem
A handle is not property. It is a tenancy.
Ask most people online where their audience lives and they will name a platform. Ask them what they own, and the answer gets uncomfortable. A handle is granted at will, revocable at will, and non-portable by design.
- You cannot take your name with you. The same person is @jdupont on one network, @j_dupont on another, @jeandupont.official on a third, and nothing at all on the fourth because someone else got there first.
- You cannot take your audience with you. Every follower relationship is an entry in someone else's database. When a platform declines, changes its algorithm, changes its rules, or changes hands, that relationship does not travel.
- You cannot prove you are you. Verification has become something platforms sell, revoke, and redefine. Impersonation remains trivially easy.
- You have no address. You have a collection of profile URLs on domains you do not control, held together in practice by a link-in-bio page hosted on yet another domain you do not control.
The domain name system solved this problem for the web in the 1990s and has been quietly reliable ever since. A domain is the only identifier on the internet an individual can actually hold: registered in your name, renewable on your terms, movable between providers, and independent of any single application. It is the closest thing the network has to a deed. What has been missing is not the technology — it is a namespace that says, plainly and in the language people already use, what the thing is for.