Owning your content and where you put it is crucial in the online world. The first step to establishing your corner on the internet is to choose a domain name1.

After obtaining a domain name, many people only set up a website. However, I recommend taking the next step of creating subdomain redirects for your social media handles.

mammoth elephant being attacked
By Cloudinary, CC BY-SA 4.0

For example, when mastodon.social suffered a DDoS attack, I moved to hachyderm.io2, but the mastodon link I hand out to folks remained unchanged.

How you ask? It’s mastodon.kau.sh and I control the redirect. I just switched it intenally from mastodon.social/@kaushikgopal → hachyderm.io/@kaush3.

This is also why I am not terribly worried about changing my handles on Github, Twitter, LinkedIn, or YouTube, as I have redirects for all of these:

To take control of your online presence, buy your own domain, adjust your DNS settings4, and start using your own URLs. It’s a simple first step with a big impact.

  1. After many many attempts, I landed on one that I liked. I use namecheap (referral code) ↩︎

  2. It was already on my mind to be honest and I guess this was the push I needed. ↩︎

  3. The added benefit is that I don’t have to remember or type Mastodon’s unattractive URLs. ↩︎

  4. Cloudflare makes these trivially easy. ↩︎