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> Restricting ourselves to the scarcity of a single namespace seems both sensible & practical, like a straightforward route towards adoptability, towards a more

> Restricting ourselves to the scarcity of a single namespace seems both sensible & practical, like a straightforward route towards adoptability, towards a more likely to be impactful protocol. But I do hope some of the wilder, less restrained options for how we do naming get a chance, are a part of our broader experiments in naming. Do you have some particular options in mind? Practically any example I am can come up with ends up devolving to a single namespace. The least restrictive one I can recall is the Usenet namespace where the equivalent of a subdomain didn't — at least in principle — require permission from the domain "owner" to establish (eg. alt.comics.superman.dies.dies.dies). In practice this required coordination and consensus among various administrators for a new group to be established, and under various scenarios existing "owners" could object.

rektide 6y ago
Overall I think letting people pick their own pet names & grow their personal popularity is the most important step we can take as an onlining civilization. It's also going to be total chaos, but I think we'd have to keep growing & iterating, via a lot of bad failing. Present the complexity, present the multitude of options, & surface historical data to show who favors & prefers what, over time. A more practical take, I'd love a domain name system that only promised that, at some time, i was the owner of a certain DNS domain. If I stopped being the owner, I could still continue hosting my site, my identity would be cryptographically well known & certifiable, people would know who to come to (or maybe not, not a hard requirement for this scenario; like HIP they should know me when we talk & i do want to say it's me), even though the link, the "ownership" (renter-ship) of the domain i'd held had expired. This again is another huge host of interesting messy hard problems, and if someone does get my keys, i'm hosed, but i really like how it favors a very strong distributed identity over this pressing incessant badgering need DNS has to enforce consistency & singularness.
- webmaven 6y ago
  Hmm. So something like sending mail to a person at a street address? That is, even if you don't still live there (and even if there is no forwarding address), it's obvious who it is for (which isn't the current occupant).

rektide 6y ago

Overall I think letting people pick their own pet names & grow their personal popularity is the most important step we can take as an onlining civilization. It's also going to be total chaos, but I think we'd have to keep growing & iterating, via a lot of bad failing. Present the complexity, present the multitude of options, & surface historical data to show who favors & prefers what, over time. A more practical take, I'd love a domain name system that only promised that, at some time, i was the owner of a certain DNS domain. If I stopped being the owner, I could still continue hosting my site, my identity would be cryptographically well known & certifiable, people would know who to come to (or maybe not, not a hard requirement for this scenario; like HIP they should know me when we talk & i do want to say it's me), even though the link, the "ownership" (renter-ship) of the domain i'd held had expired. This again is another huge host of interesting messy hard problems, and if someone does get my keys, i'm hosed, but i really like how it favors a very strong distributed identity over this pressing incessant badgering need DNS has to enforce consistency & singularness.

webmaven 6y ago
Hmm. So something like sending mail to a person at a street address? That is, even if you don't still live there (and even if there is no forwarding address), it's obvious who it is for (which isn't the current occupant).