@melvincarvalho wrote:
Solid Name System
Many decentralized web advocates come to solid but raise concerns about the dependency on the DNS system.
I wonder if we could in parallel to the web design a system to use .solid domains. Similar systems are .onion and .bit
see more : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root
I’ve had informal conversations with IETF people and they seem to think this is technically feasible.
Open Questions
So this issue is a place holder to brain storm design out the possibility of .solid domains.
- How would they be looked up
- What would the URLs return
- How would you prevent people squatting lots of domains
It would also be good if we talk to someone at ICANN and ask them save this for us.
- How would they be looked up?
Initial thoughts on how the routing could work.
Create a special nick solidns (solid naming service) that will manage routing.
Then in various pods you would have
/.well-known/solidns/example
This would map to the domain example.solid
This would return machine readable data (turtle) which would be equivalent to a DNS name server.
Via a bootstrap .solid supporting user agents would look up the .solid record using HTTP, and then route the request accordingly.
The governance of /.well-known/solidns would be a different question. We would have to create a technical set of norms managed by the community.
2. What would the URL return
There are two URLs the .solid URL (used for content) and the solidns url (used for lookup)
What does the .solid URL return?
Would return a standard web document
After the routing you will end on a solid pod that contains the content
What does the solidns URL return?
Well this would be RDF of course
A simple starting point would be to create a minimal subset of the DNS system (which can be modeled in RDF)
An ontology could be developed to capture the common terms
Perhaps the devil is in the detail in some cases and this will tie in to (1) also
This section is partially incomplete needs more work
3. How would you prevent people squatting lots of domains
This is perhaps as much a social problem as technical one. But solid is designed to be social.
The community would have to create a sensible set of rules that makes sense for the system and worked practically. A web of trust which is used in GPG may be leveraged to prevent one person registering too many domains.
There is also the concept of a strong set in the web of trust. We could perhaps have an sss (like the www on its side) to mean the Solid Strong Set , where members were part of the community and have agreed to a code of conduct.
The community would need to come up with sensible rules to get the system going. This would require reading some literature and brain storming. One possible way would be :
- Each user is allowed to claim one .solid domain
- In order to get a new domain they have to give up their old .solid domain
These are just rough ideas. Hopefully they can be fleshed out into a proposal and working system. Feedback welcome.
There has been some discussion on https://github.com/solid/solid/issues/201 with @megoth, @kjetlk, @daniel-albrecht, @steven-tomilnson, and @tiagosomda and would like to invite more here.