[diggan]

> The fact that the AT Protocol relies on everyone having a domain name

Well, either that or someone else hosting their identity (see did:plc), which seems to be the part you say should exist?

Probably DNS is the most decentralized centralized system we have available today that most people can actually use, unless I'm missing some obviously better way of doing the same thing?

[nsndndkddk]

The thing your missing is ICANN is headquartered in the US. The US political situation is dire and I think this could be a real danger for the internet at large. We might end up with disagreeing DNS worldwide at some point. E.g. if you hold a domain and have a non-authorized viewpoint so your DNS entry gets snuffed.

But from a practical point of view a decentralised system should not rely on domain name ownership. Any computer can generate a private/public key pair, which is all you need for identify.

[diggan]

> Any computer can generate a private/public key pair, which is all you need for identify.

Right, but once you've generated those, then what? You need a global registry of sorts so people can lookup each others keys for example, which is why DNS kind of is the best we have available today.

I don't think there is any perfect solution here, but it's hard to come up with something that has better trade-offs than DNS. Sure, ICANN might be based in the US, but so far DNS been relatively safe to rely on, and if ends up not reliable in the future, I'm not sure social media profiles is the biggest worry at that point.

[dist-epoch]

> Well, either that or someone else hosting their identity (see did:plc)

Wouldn't that turn into did:plc:facebook all over again?

[diggan]

If there was no way of moving away from it, probably yeah. But since you can migrate from a did:plc to did:web, I don't feel like they're very similar situations at all.