Thorough, complex, expansive feature sets are where those skillsets can shine; no glory in building something simple, to the point, and limited in scope.
Most products suck because people just cannot help themselves. It takes insane focus and control to override those tendencies when hundreds or thousands of people are working on a product (miss you Steve).
These three words evoke PTSD in me as hearing it means promotion is no-go again.
The domain feature hasn't blocked dev on more important things. In fact this deal is (according to bluesky) their first attempt at something to generate some revenue, with the goal being to never have to use advertising, something that the users would in fact be grateful for and consider to be important.
I was still naively thinking in terms of redirects from your old instance to your new one, but that's not going to help you if your old instance vanishes in thin air.
I think that we absolutely need more of this as this gives the users ownership over their identity. Right now, if the New York Times wants to get verified on social media they rely on the platform to do so. With this it would be their own choice.
DNS is really not a good platform to build personal identity on.
But I don't know if this is being imagined as "how businesses will communicate on our platform" or it is being treated as "regular users will totally manage their own DNS".
And yet you seem to be really confused about the difference between DNS and a domain name registration.
Curious.
Anyway my understanding is that Bluesky uses DIDs for exactly that reason, to punt the actual naming implementation and avoid silly internet fights like this.
And there’s already at least one blockchain purpose-built for naming - https://handshake.org/.
Apart from that, I think per-service identities are the best that can be hoped for. If I choose to engage with Facebook, I have to trust them to some extent anyway, so trusting them with my identity on Facebook is probably good enough. If I want to establish that some Twitter identity is the same as some Instagram identity, I can do so by directly referencing them from one another. I don't think we can do much better than that without involving the state.
For individuals, the cost of losing your domain is far too high if it means losing your identity on multiple services at the same time. And, if nothing else, people eventually die, so domains will be lost by their original owner and then re-used, breaking the notion of identity again in the longer run.
People keep devising more and more involved ways to maintain identities other than your legal one, but if you think about it you can still lose any of those and no one should use them for anything serious.
And if you take 1000s of judges of different ideologies who could do it, I would rather put my trust in Google that they won't mistakenly ban my account.
Entire brands are built around domain names, and even when not, they’re extremely common in advertising for most brands. To the tune of thousands or tens of thousands of dollars spent to acquire the right domain name.
Btw, do you have a better proposal to mitigate the risk of failure to renew domain registration in time?
If several services recognized your identity by virtue of having the same domain name, the fallout from losing that identity is much worse: you lose access to all these services at once, and whoever gets the domain name next will gain access to all of your followers and have a pre-built history. And if one service decides to ban you, you'll be exactly where you were if your identity was specific to that service.
So, with DNS-based cross-service identities, you are at best in the same place as having service-specific identities, and at worse, much worse off.
Additionally, a service which bans your account will typically not give the same name to a new user, or, even if they do, they will still separate the two identities / cleanup all previous posts. A DNS registrar will absolutely give the same domain to someone else if you stop paying for it, and any services which recognize that as your identity may not even know that a change in ownership has taken place.
For 99.9% of users this is a not at all simple.
I do agree with you, I just don’t think it’s really an issue unless having a domain is the only way to have an “identity” on the network. If it’s something you can opt into, then I don’t see how it’s a problem. It depends on the implementation of course.
This isn't unlike running your blog and I'm pretty sure there are solutions like WordPress.com that run it for you with your domain.
This is why Mastodon instances should be run by user-owned nonprofit cooperatives so that there's accountability on the day to day operations to the people who depend on it and there's policies around continuity of service. This doesn't have to be hard, and it already fits into existing legal frameworks.
* probably
I have to be honest, I can think of many far bigger issues with social media, namely, bullying, harassment, misinformation, and addiction, among others
So run your own instance?
SRV records are the correct solution, but neither WebFinger nor Mastodon chose to use them.
in fact, when corporations try to own their domain space authentication, they have to buy hundreds of lookalike domains to avoid imposters.
Add a few meta tags to your website homepage, use that homepage as your "identity" to log in to websites, and they'd up your configured identity provider to do the login & request name/email/whatever else. You weren't locked in to a particular provider, since you logged in as _your_ webpage and could change the meta tags to point to a different provider.
You are always leasing it, and if the registry decide to jack the price, remove your domain or give it to someone else they can (usually with some level of self-imposed rules). The ruls vary between gTLDs and ccTLDs, but believing you "own" a domain can be a dangerous assumption.
I don't know if domains are the way either, but at least they're a name reservation system that's established and works. At the current price of a domain, it comes down to $1 a month, which is a great value if you can use it to identify yourself with, authenticate, authorize and own your own digital identity.
It can also be cheaper, because if this is a mass service for every person out there, scale will reduce some of the cost.
The great advantage of this workflow is that it minimises damage in event of service shutdown or malicious actors.
By maintaining discrete identities for each service you are compartmentalising and building resilience. It also provides a first layer of privacy, since it becomes more difficult for a malicious actor to correlate identities across services.
Lot of feedback originally was common people won't bother to buy domain and integrate with BlueSky, so this is great that they are doing this.
Bare minimum but fast message passing as a social communication layer.
If all of these new platforms are trying to become a better or more bloated version of what Twitter has become, then they will never catch on like the viral tool that Twitter originally was.
None of them learned the lesson of google wave, it seems. (i.e. look at these really cool features and extensions, this is what you want right?)