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Comment by tamimio | Hacker News Reader

The internet needs an independent tld that’s not controlled by any entity, I see a lot of people over selling self hosting as the ultimate freedom, and while it’s great and better than relying in saas, you are still under the mercy of some entity and have a single point of failure in your setup. And before someone chimes in, onion aren’t practical.

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Between memorable, decentralized, and secure, you can choose at most two. I am fine with not having memorable names, as long as the tooling is right. For the most part, I don't type domain names by hand. I use bookmarks, copy and paste links, navigate websites, scan QR codes, ...

There are several decentralized schemes where the identifier is cryptographically bound to a private key, none of which I can use in my browser. Since a majority of people use a handful of public DNS resolvers anyways, these resolvers could deploy split DNS for a special-use domain, let's say ".did" (short for decentralized identity), and resolve this special TLD differently. This way people do not need special software to access websites on a ".did" domain.

Maybe DNSSEC could be mandatory and your domain name is the key digest from the DS record, although this prevents key rotation while maintaining a stable domain name.

Yep, I agree, that’s actually a good approach, and the resolving happens by a trusted entity say FSF or similar mechanism. It’s doable but I think the internet didn’t yet grasp the concept that all their infrastructure and resources are technically still heavily centralized by few entities, you can have a fully on prem setup with all “sovereign” policies and all, then your recourses go offline because that one entity controlling the tld been asked to do so by the government where that entity is.

Are you saying onion isn't practical, or Tor isn't practical? They're not the same thing.

Considering you usually need Tor Browser to access onion, are those really so different?

You do not. Tor browser is just a browser and proxy baked together for convenience. You can use any proxy and any browser you want.

Actually, tor is also not browser centric at all either. It does TCP (if not more), so any protocol will do. Proxy is typically a SOCKS interface IIRC, so any client will often do as well.

Yeah, that’s not practical, if you can’t access a certain tld without using a special network, then you lost the purpose of having it in the first place. onion needs tor network, browser or not, plus the horrendous name too. A practical convenient tld is where you use any browser on any internet connected device to type a human readable name.

That was the idea behind namecoin. But they screwed up their pricing and died.

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