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!

  • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
    7·
    1 year ago

    DNS is extremely hierarchical. There are only a few root DNS servers from which all common domain names are derived.

    Some people have tried to set up their own TLDs over the years but the problem with those is that you need to use specifically their DNS server or the domains won’t resolve, and nobody is going to do that.

    Alternative domain systems (onion addresses, ethereum domains) are much more independent, but I wouldn’t call DNS federated.

    • jerkface@lemmy.ca
      3·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • 𝒍𝒆𝒎𝒂𝒏𝒏@lemmy.one
      1·
      1 year ago

      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 😟