4 ms·

For developers, I largely agree with you, though even in that demographic often it's nice to not have to fiddle with the details yourself, even if you know how.

For developers, I largely agree with you, though even in that demographic often it's nice to not have to fiddle with the details yourself, even if you know how. But I'm interested in a different demographic. Someone who wants to run their own blog, or run a Nextcloud server for their family, or host albums from their photography work shouldn't need to understand DNS, TLS certs, IP addresses, ports, etc. They should be able to install an app on their laptop (or old Android phone, or Raspberry Pi), go through a quick OAuth flow to tunnel out of their home network, and have their content available to the rest of the web. Obviously there are UX and security concerns, but these are solvable problems.

judge2020 5y ago
> , and have their content available to the rest of the web. The issue is that DNS and registrar services are fragmented by design, and there doesn't seem to be a standard DNS API that would make it easy to simply say"select your domain registrar" and use that to start an oauth flow then manage DNS records for a site. Therefore, anyone who does run even a simple service like hosted wordpress (without using the host as their registrar) needs to at least have basic knowledge of what DNS records are and how to put in their registrar without messing up email records or other subdomains they might have.
- anderspitman 5y ago
  There's the DomainConnect protocol[0] which has been around for a few years. I didn't find it particularly well matched for open source projects, so I've also done some work on my own protocol[1]. The current draft is implemented by TakingNames.io (as a provider) and boringproxy (as a client). You can read more about it and watch a demo here[2]. That said, I think DNS might not be the right layer of abstraction to simplify this. I think we need an open tunneling protocol[3]. [0]: https://www.domainconnect.org/ https://www.domainconnect.org/ [1]: https://github.com/takingnames/namedrop-protocol-spec https://github.com/takingnames/namedrop-protocol-spec [2]: https://takingnames.io/blog/introducing-takingnames-io https://takingnames.io/blog/introducing-takingnames-io [3]: https://forum.indiebits.io/t/toward-an-open-tunneling-protocol/30/1 https://forum.indiebits.io/t/toward-an-open-tunneling-protoc...

judge2020 5y ago

> , and have their content available to the rest of the web. The issue is that DNS and registrar services are fragmented by design, and there doesn't seem to be a standard DNS API that would make it easy to simply say"select your domain registrar" and use that to start an oauth flow then manage DNS records for a site. Therefore, anyone who does run even a simple service like hosted wordpress (without using the host as their registrar) needs to at least have basic knowledge of what DNS records are and how to put in their registrar without messing up email records or other subdomains they might have.

anderspitman 5y ago
There's the DomainConnect protocol[0] which has been around for a few years. I didn't find it particularly well matched for open source projects, so I've also done some work on my own protocol[1]. The current draft is implemented by TakingNames.io (as a provider) and boringproxy (as a client). You can read more about it and watch a demo here[2]. That said, I think DNS might not be the right layer of abstraction to simplify this. I think we need an open tunneling protocol[3]. [0]: https://www.domainconnect.org/ https://www.domainconnect.org/ [1]: https://github.com/takingnames/namedrop-protocol-spec https://github.com/takingnames/namedrop-protocol-spec [2]: https://takingnames.io/blog/introducing-takingnames-io https://takingnames.io/blog/introducing-takingnames-io [3]: https://forum.indiebits.io/t/toward-an-open-tunneling-protocol/30/1 https://forum.indiebits.io/t/toward-an-open-tunneling-protoc...