I was struggling to wrap my head around how federated social media works until I realized that email has basically been doing the same thing for 30 years. Different email servers are like instances of a federated network. You can send emails to people from within a single server or you can send emails to people on any other mail server. Your email address is a username followed by an ‘@’ and the server address, just like on Lemmy. Email is a decentralized service I’ve been using the whole time!
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Fair. It’s not the same but the tools are there. Anyone can set up their own root servers. All that’s needed is a way for people to conveniently opt in / stop visiting Reddit. There’s no reason there couldn’t be (and in fact, there probably are) shadow root servers used by distributed organizations.
There are federated aspects of the DNS protocol. My secondaries are hosted by other people’s primaries and I secondary for them. But yes, there is one big defacto network that we all have to belong to.
Definitely agree.
Domains not resolving is probably one of the quicker problems to solve (switch the DNS server) compared to other issues with custom TLDs imo…
I was looking at OpenTLD, and was mostly put off by the need to install their SSL root certificate for secure access to their custom TLDs, on every device. That’s a lot of effort just for some custom domains, which can only be accessed by other OpenTLD users anyway 😟