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Comment by apitman | Hacker News Reader

You've identified a real problem but blamed the wrong target. We don't need to avoid using domain names, we need to make them an order of magnitude easier for laypeople to buy and use.

99% of people who could benefit from owning a domain should never have to know what a DNS record or TLS cert is. This should all be managed by apps through a simple delegation system built on OAuth2.

You log on to bsky.app, they say, "want to connect a domain?". You say yes and get redirected to your domain registrar, where you grant access to for bsky.app to have control over bsky.example.com until you revoke access.

DomainConnect[0] should solve this but in practice it's turned out to be very gatekeepy in my opinion.

[0]: https://www.domainconnect.org/

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You're only addressing half the issue here. By delegating control of your domain to bsky.app, you're still beholden to a centralized ban list and retain no control over your own instance.

If they ban you then you take everything, including your profile domain, and move somewhere else. This mobility would do a lot to ensure they don't ban users without a good reason. It's incentive alignment and insurance.

Are you saying that if you get banned you have the ability to take your bluesky name and all data to another server somewhere?

I have not ready anything about the protocol yet, is there something in it that keeps all your data accessible to you after a ban?

Is list of contacts, other people's posts and such part of that move or what exactly is left to someone after they are banned?

Edit: oh wait I'm completely wrong, that's not a key, that's an ID in a directory, lol. The public key thing is just a plan.

There's a thing called DID that identifies you. There's a few options, but one is called "DID PLC" with a sample implementation here:

https://github.com/did-method-plc/did-method-plc

With the disclaimer that I haven't dug into it seriously enough, I understand it's a public key (that I can also rotate) that I can use to prove that an account somewhere else is really mine. Note that I have no idea what the private key is, or how to dig it out - I'm sure that's documented somewhere, but I wasn't interested enough for now.

TL;DR: there definitely is a theoretical mechanism for users to "take their toys with them." How it works out in practice is a different matter. I suspect most users wouldn't know they're supposed to keep a bundle of data stored somewhere for a dark hour. I also wonder how the protocol protects itself from people accidentally putting that data in public.

There are no safe haven registrar that are immune from harassment against lawful contents. There's no guarantee that you can port-out domains against registrar's will, even if it's technically your property.

The whole "we can just use DNS names as ID and it'll be unbannable" idea is just relying on the fact that domain names aren't normally used as social media IDs and that more neutrality is expected from registrars, and neither of these presumptions are guaranteed.

Once enough users start using domain names and gets >100k daily likes with anime illustrations, same people as who were problems ARE going to get mad and set up their systems to just hammer Namecheap, GoDaddy, Gandi, Porkbun, until their support gives in just like it always happened. If they didn't, they inject faults in credit card payments, make their authoritative servers unresolvable in UK, Apple devices, on 1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8, so on and forth, until they do.

What are you optimizing for and what's your threat model? Personally I'm optimizing for UX and data ownership. One reason centralized services are bad is they tend to turn into monopolies. Once there's no competition there's no incentive for UX to be good. More ads, less useful features, more useless features, etc.

Using a decentralized protocol and providing custom domains is sufficient for me.

If you're optimizing for censorship resistance and your threat model is that registrars want to take you down because there are enough people mad about what you're posting, you're going to have to make UX tradeoffs that most people don't and shouldn't need to.

From GP:

> If they ban you then you take everything, including your profile domain, ...

This reads like censorship resistance against moderation/management going insane on its own, to me. And in reality, that rarely happens. It's ongoing on Twitter, kind of, but that's less than once in a decade occurrence, and the crazy element wasn't internal.

What happens more often is some fundamentalist group or something starts harassing companies, often leveraging advertisers, credit card companies, perhaps some backend APIs too, sometimes even foreign laws way outside jurisdictions, to get them swallow their agendas. That leads to bans and insane policies getting introduced.

And, if you look at what happened to Twitter in last few years, I think you can see the latter of above two descriptions is closer to what happened to it; whether it was foreign conspiracy, or purely to that guy's insanity, or politics, it was external force that lead to the situation that necessitated escape. It was sane-ish up to the acquisition.

This is an interesting take! I don't necessarily disagree with it—we could definitely make the DNS system more accessible than it is today—but I don't think it's the panacea either, there are still a lot of costs and paperwork involved with owning a domain name that aren't related to the actual technical knowledge required. How is my 12 year old cousin whose parents don't understand technology supposed to buy a domain name just to be able to comment on a youtube video?

Certainly I think there are regulatory and social issues as well. The current system was built in a time where it made far less sense for that 12 yo to have their own domain name. But they also didn't have their own phone numbers back then, but the phone system evolved so they could. DNS needs to evolve too.

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