annoyed that atproto depends on dns, and dns is such a clear vector of censorship that seems likely to continue to be used more frequently
altho i guess browsers etc with alternative dns resolvers, or even dns-over-tor, is a pretty straightforward workaround, but i think not currently mainstream
@notplants To be fair, everything else except for the super hardcore peer-to-peer networks like nostr and SSB have that problem. It's particularly bad for activity pub where the domain name is in the ID of every single object.
I suppose it's not much of a consolation, but DNS is not strong censorship. Its easy to circumvent for those who seek and desire.
We already have to circumvent DNS censorship regularly; If you want to download Circuit Board diagrams for obsolete TVs or something you will probably need to bypass DNS censorship. ICE bragged about censoring 8 million domains in a year iirc.
@forestjohnson appreciate and agree with the overview
I guess being built-in-resistant to dns censorship is also a missed opportunity for user acquisition for atproto and apub ... when governments do censor dns it would be such a compelling selling point if they just kept working ...
@notplants I think the story with ATProto was supposed to be that the identities were DIDs, which means you can use DNS for your identity, but you can also use multiple other pluggable DID interfaces. But it sounds like they very quickly bailed on that when building the app, requiring things like HTTP since they "just work"
I think people justifiably have soured on entirely p2p systems not named bittorrent. Because so many of them have been developed and then instantly failed, like, they basically won't turn on or they won't connect or they just appear to not do anything. As far as I know, the unfortunate reality is there just aren't any public & censorship resistant name systems that work reliably. (Zooko's triangle)
If you can tolerate the name being non-human readable, then it works fine, like a magnet link. Magnet links are... they work every single time.
I personally believe that namecoin is probably the best attempt to solve this problem. However, I gave up on using it after my namecoin names expired, I forgot to renew them, and they were stolen by a squatter. wrote about it long ago here:
https://sequentialread.com/how-to-register-a-namecoin-bit-domain-with-electrum-nmc/
Maybe one day it would be nice to have a comprehensive full suite of software and services that would make namecoin usable. I always kind of planned on trying to build that stuff... But I convinced myself that it was more important to make servers usable as they are first to create a jumping-off point for independent publishing, kind of like what you're working on right now. And then after I feel comfortable with that, then I would consider looking into improving the usability of namecoin.
@notplants er, I should say, namecoin as best _purely technical_ solution, more realistic solutions will probably be more akin to private trackers or algospeak on social networks, social solutions
