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But we already have a "public town square": it's called DNS, Domain Name System, and it's great. With about $20/year you get "verified" and everyone knows you o

But we already have a "public town square": it's called DNS, Domain Name System, and it's great. With about $20/year you get "verified" and everyone knows you own "foo.com", or .whatever [1]. It's just that we, as in we the users, failed this great "public town square" because as soon as we get in the public we get scared and need to belong to a tribe: the Twitter tribe, the TikTok tribe, the Instagram tribe, and so forth. [1] https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt

dimva 4y ago
The internet is not a public square for the same reason the world isn't a public square - it requires effort to see things from outside your own community. Twitter (and Facebook), on the other hand, will regularly push things to me from fascists, communists, "environmentalist" degrowthers, and other weirdos who I have no interest in hearing from.
- ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
  DNS is not tantamount to the internet: you can very well have a TCP/IP connection to a computer through the internet, i.e. wires and waves, and not use DNS at all. Having a DNS domain is akin to going into a public town square and setting up your stall selling whatever vegetables you grew in your garden. But just as the individual farmers were run over by large corporations who invented the hyper-market, just as so the individual users have been fleeing, increasingly in the past 15 years, to be under the umbrella of big-corp-du-jour.com. Making another-service.com with the façade of a "public town square" is just making another hypermarket. And also, it's called a "public town square", with accent on town, as in "group of houses" [1], because it's meant for a relatively small population. There is perhaps a reason we don't have "public megacity squares" (stampedes and crowd crushes aside). And there is perhaps something inherently wrong when an individual has 100+ million "followers": in a public town square a stall could not sell vegetables to 100+ million people since there aren't that many people in the town in the first place. [1] https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=town https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=town
marcusverus 4y ago
> But we already have a "public town square": it's called DNS, Domain Name System, and it's great. With about $20/year you get "verified" and everyone knows you own "foo.com", or .whatever [1]. A public square is "an open public area in a city or town where people gather". DNS is far too abstract to even remotely resemble a public square--just like "capitalism" or "zoning laws" are too abstract to resemble a public square. Nor is foo.com a digital public square (just like your house isn't a physical public square). Public squares (digital and physical) are places where people already gather.
- ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
  DNS is the public town square: when using browsers, navigating across domains, we are all fundamentally gathered in the DNS space. Me having "foo.com" is akin to setting up a stall in this public town square and selling my vegetables, and you are free to visit "foo.com" and buy into my ideology, or simply never visit it. And yes, precisely, "foo.com", or "twitter.com", or "tiktok.com", cannot, by definition, be digital public squares: they are just stalls, booths, were we go and check certain vegetables.
  - GrinningFool 4y ago
    That seems like saying your town is a public town square because everyone has an address that can be reached by post.
    - ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
      Not all analogies can be saved, nevertheless let's try: the town = the TCP/IP suite of protocols (UDP, QUIC, etc. included) the public town square = DNS a booth selling vegetables in the public town square = a domain, "foo.com", publishing whatever their opinion is about reality and everything else A great lie told again and again by "social media" domains is that they are "platforms", but a platform is meant to sustain something else beyond itself. "foo.com", "twitter.com" are merely individual booths, where all the value is owned by the person/company owning that domain, irregardless of how "easy" it is to "post" on "foo.com" and how difficult it is to setup a new booth/domain on DNS: DNS is that platform we have been hearing ad nauseam. And even more, a domain, such as "foo.com", or "twitter.com", or "tiktok.com", is fundamentally someone's estate, owned by a master [1]: it's a glaringly obvious contradiction in terms to say that a domain could ever be a "public town square". Entering and adding value to someone else's domain is akin to belonging to a feudal master, a technofeudalism if you will [2]. And some tehnofeuds are great, I personally enjoy "github.com", but believing that "github.com" is a "public town square" for code, not backing up your work in other places, it's at the very least irresponsible. [1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/domain#etymonline_v_13918 https://www.etymonline.com/word/domain#etymonline_v_13918 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMSNpq4K67o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMSNpq4K67o
jimbokun 4y ago
Is there a business model to be found for building "social networks" around domain names? Making it even easier to register domain names. Rebuilding your friend network between the DNS names of friends, family and other associates. Sharing photos and videos and birthday reminders. I feel like it's marketing all of the technologies of the early web that enabled these things, but with great UX and an order of magnitude less complexity for getting all of it setup.
- ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
  Is there a business model? Absolutely, you just have to not want to be the techno-imperator of the network graph and not want to become a trillionaire from building social services. Disclaimer: I am building such a "social technology" around domain names, letting users truly own the database of their interaction with a service, https://github.com/plurid/deserve https://github.com/plurid/deserve

dimva 4y ago

The internet is not a public square for the same reason the world isn't a public square - it requires effort to see things from outside your own community. Twitter (and Facebook), on the other hand, will regularly push things to me from fascists, communists, "environmentalist" degrowthers, and other weirdos who I have no interest in hearing from.

ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
DNS is not tantamount to the internet: you can very well have a TCP/IP connection to a computer through the internet, i.e. wires and waves, and not use DNS at all. Having a DNS domain is akin to going into a public town square and setting up your stall selling whatever vegetables you grew in your garden. But just as the individual farmers were run over by large corporations who invented the hyper-market, just as so the individual users have been fleeing, increasingly in the past 15 years, to be under the umbrella of big-corp-du-jour.com. Making another-service.com with the façade of a "public town square" is just making another hypermarket. And also, it's called a "public town square", with accent on town, as in "group of houses" [1], because it's meant for a relatively small population. There is perhaps a reason we don't have "public megacity squares" (stampedes and crowd crushes aside). And there is perhaps something inherently wrong when an individual has 100+ million "followers": in a public town square a stall could not sell vegetables to 100+ million people since there aren't that many people in the town in the first place. [1] https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=town https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=town

marcusverus 4y ago

> But we already have a "public town square": it's called DNS, Domain Name System, and it's great. With about $20/year you get "verified" and everyone knows you own "foo.com", or .whatever [1]. A public square is "an open public area in a city or town where people gather". DNS is far too abstract to even remotely resemble a public square--just like "capitalism" or "zoning laws" are too abstract to resemble a public square. Nor is foo.com a digital public square (just like your house isn't a physical public square). Public squares (digital and physical) are places where people already gather.

ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
DNS is the public town square: when using browsers, navigating across domains, we are all fundamentally gathered in the DNS space. Me having "foo.com" is akin to setting up a stall in this public town square and selling my vegetables, and you are free to visit "foo.com" and buy into my ideology, or simply never visit it. And yes, precisely, "foo.com", or "twitter.com", or "tiktok.com", cannot, by definition, be digital public squares: they are just stalls, booths, were we go and check certain vegetables.
- GrinningFool 4y ago
  That seems like saying your town is a public town square because everyone has an address that can be reached by post.
  - ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
    Not all analogies can be saved, nevertheless let's try: the town = the TCP/IP suite of protocols (UDP, QUIC, etc. included) the public town square = DNS a booth selling vegetables in the public town square = a domain, "foo.com", publishing whatever their opinion is about reality and everything else A great lie told again and again by "social media" domains is that they are "platforms", but a platform is meant to sustain something else beyond itself. "foo.com", "twitter.com" are merely individual booths, where all the value is owned by the person/company owning that domain, irregardless of how "easy" it is to "post" on "foo.com" and how difficult it is to setup a new booth/domain on DNS: DNS is that platform we have been hearing ad nauseam. And even more, a domain, such as "foo.com", or "twitter.com", or "tiktok.com", is fundamentally someone's estate, owned by a master [1]: it's a glaringly obvious contradiction in terms to say that a domain could ever be a "public town square". Entering and adding value to someone else's domain is akin to belonging to a feudal master, a technofeudalism if you will [2]. And some tehnofeuds are great, I personally enjoy "github.com", but believing that "github.com" is a "public town square" for code, not backing up your work in other places, it's at the very least irresponsible. [1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/domain#etymonline_v_13918 https://www.etymonline.com/word/domain#etymonline_v_13918 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMSNpq4K67o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMSNpq4K67o

jimbokun 4y ago

Is there a business model to be found for building "social networks" around domain names? Making it even easier to register domain names. Rebuilding your friend network between the DNS names of friends, family and other associates. Sharing photos and videos and birthday reminders. I feel like it's marketing all of the technologies of the early web that enabled these things, but with great UX and an order of magnitude less complexity for getting all of it setup.

ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
Is there a business model? Absolutely, you just have to not want to be the techno-imperator of the network graph and not want to become a trillionaire from building social services. Disclaimer: I am building such a "social technology" around domain names, letting users truly own the database of their interaction with a service, https://github.com/plurid/deserve https://github.com/plurid/deserve