Most paid certs aren’t worth much anyway. Payment and delivery info for DV certs isn’t validated by anyone, it’s literally the same concept as Let’s Encrypt. OV and EV are the only ones that theoretically have any value, but nobody is using those ever since they got rid of the URL bar labeling; even Amazon is on DV nowadays.
You go to the settings and verify it. You don’t have to host anything, just verify that you own the domain via text file or DNS record and choose to set it as your handle. Bluesky’s ATProto has a couple extra layers of indirection and it’s very easy to get a custom handle as a result.
The downside of this setup is that running your own complete network is completely impossible. If you want to follow
theonion.com
, anyone can finddid:plc:a4pqq234yw7fqbddawjo7y35
in the DNS without too much work. That’s the identifier for The Onion’s Bluesky account, and even if they swapped back to.bsky.social
, that ID number would stay. But that DID tells you absolutely nothing about where the data is currently hosted.So how do you figure that out? Well, you register it with https://plc.directory/ which is ran by Bluesky and cannot currently be replaced. There’s fancy cryptography involved that makes it hard for them to spoof data, but they are perfectly capable of simply not giving any data out for any given DID.