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Comment by peterkelly | Hacker News Reader

You need to renew your domain every year. You need to either pay your hosting provider or, in the case of hardware you run yourself, your ISP providing network connectivity, on a regular basis. How is relying on a third-party for certificates any different?

And you do understand the reason why having browsers verify that they're actually talking to who they think they're talking to is important, right?

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Nope. I can and have used my IP address. I host from the computer sitting 1 meter to my left in my apartment. I have for 20+ years. It's just as easy to send http://73.5.160.29/somefunnypic.jpg as http://superkuh.com/somefunnypic.jpg on IRC, or in email, or whatever if it comes to that. Plus there are overlay networks like Tor that I use that do provide end-point identity verification that work great without a centralized domain or CA system.

HTTP/3 would break this.

This doesn't really seem like a real issue. By eschewing domain names, you've already killed any chance of a mainstream audience for the site. That's fine, but it's also not particularly complicated for the users to support an alternative protocol where you don't need TLS if it's already so niche.

> By eschewing domain names, you've already killed any chance of a mainstream audience for the site. That's fine, but it's also not particularly complicated for the users to support an alternative protocol where you don't need TLS if it's already so niche.

These are very different. If need to convince your audience to get and install some alternate client with an alternate protocol, now you audience it at best only a few techies who can do that for themselves.

Whereas sending anyone an URL they can click on with any client, even if it identified by an IP address instead of a hostname, is as easy at it gets.

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