Its far too complex and expensive for normal users. And businesses don't communicate officially on discord outside of their own server where they are specially tagged.
HN is frequently ahead of the curve in terms of trends, so it’s not shocking if most people don’t understand the value until they see someone else getting that value out of a new strategy.
In terms of it being dangerous, I don’t agree. I think having everyone associate me, my brand, my business, etc. with my domain name reduces the risk of being de-platformed because anyone that wants to can easily find me via my universal handle (aka domain) regardless of the platform. I’ll gladly take on the risk of having to remember to renew my domain name as a trade off for the added protections I get via the dispute resolution processes for domains.
> What happens when you forget to renew your domain? The bot that grabs it gets to take over your account or handle?
No. Expired domains have a well defined post-expiration lifecycle that makes it difficult to lose a domain unintentionally . If you don’t notice everything you use being broken for a month, it can’t be that important, right? Yeah, you’d lose the handle, but the account ID is typically immutable and used as a source of truth, so it wouldn’t give a new domain owner the ability to hijack your account.
I really don’t understand the harm in having more options. Would you say we should never consider anything but Dropbox because it works fine for the average user? What about someone with >250k files which tends to be what all of those sync platforms recommend as the max number of files you should try to keep in sync?
Sure, for business needs that might be adequate, but I don't use Discord for anything professional. Naturally I wouldn't want either my domain or that of my business associated with my Discord account. On the contrary, if there was an association, it would induce a moderate to heavy panic. I don't even do that for private development that I publish.
An ephemeral ID also provides many advantages, especially in these time where everyone and their dog wants to erect walls on the net. I don't want a safe net®. A safe net is for people that are scared. People that are scared are scary. Far more than the average scammer and an associated ID would even expose you to more dangerous ID theft just because you know are a more interesting target.
When’s that? Last time I checked the average HN user still thought TikTok was about dancing teens
Trying to make regular people find a free domain and pay $10-35 per year forever is a tough sell. Especially since when I die, my descendants will likely not renew my domain name so someone else could start using.
I like that some sites support domain names as ids but think it can only be optional.
I’d rather just have governments issue a unique id that serves as a public key, non-sensitive id that proves I’m me and I can link to lots of other services. To show that “heiwudhdbsbwjeh” is prepend on HN and whatever on twitter and anything I want to link there.
So rather than harmonizing names everywhere just make linking ids any time I want people to link really easy.
And maybe offer “vanity plates” where I could pay extra to claim, temporarily, prepend.usid or whatever to use instead of heiwudhdbsbwjeh.usid (and prepend.usid will just CNAME to this).