> Presumably you understand how DNS records (and more generally the entire domain name system system) work. Do you think your system would work for someone who

> Presumably you understand how DNS records (and more generally the entire domain name system system) work. Do you think your system would work for someone who did not have any of this background knowledge? I feel like this is still a significant barrier and at least part of the reason why most people use gmail/hotmail/yahoo etc. I do, but I didn't need to. For my email for example I was one of those early adopters of Google's former free tier for consumers with their own domain. My DNS provider, like most, had a wizard where I just told it my email was hosted with Google and they set up all the correct records for me, MX, SPF, etc. The same sorts of wizards would be trivial to set up for other major services supporting self-hosting if they were popular. Those who need more custom setups could still edit the records themselves, but for most people using a major hosting provider it doesn't have to be hard. There's also of course an obvious opportunity for some sort of meta-SRV record that'd allow a user to tell their DNS host that they want to set up service X with provider Y.tld and the DNS host could look up the relevant records and set it up accordingly. What I'm saying is it's not an insurmountable problem, or even really that big of a technical challenge, to make control of your own online identity easy. It's just not in the commercial interest of enough of the big players.