Spritely is doing some interesting research and I appreciate the focus on fundamentals rather than shipping features immediately.

What always stands out to me with any project attempting decentralized social media, though, is how complex it becomes compared to RSS feeds.

The one requirement of content being push based rather than pull based has so many downstream effects, and its often goes overlooked or unspoken.

There are some niceties here, but I think this is a little thin on the security aspects of the scheme: it's not clear how users establish the authenticity of transitively received petnames, for example.

More fundamentally, there's a factor outside of Zooko's triangle: trust isn't really transitive[1]. I trust my doctor and my doctor trusts their sibling, but I don't necessarily trust their sibling.

With that being said, I think there's a pretty rich research space here, and I think the edge/local aspects of this design are pretty interesting! I just hope we don't end up with a reinvention of historically insufficient web-of-trust architectures :-)

[1]: https://uhra.herts.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/2299/4349/904849.p...

Contact lists do work and are okay for friends, but businesses also need to publish contact information. What do you put on a sign, on a business card, or in an advertisement? You'd need to print the underlying id number, which makes it part of the UI.

Inevitably, people are going to want something like a 1-800 number, perhaps with a mapping to letters that are easy to remember. Either you can pick the number you want, or people are going to end up re-rolling until they get a "nice" number, and then there's competition for nice numbers just like in other namespaces.

I have long been a fan of petnames, and graph naming systems in general.

I like to use the term “nickname” for what they call “edge names” in the article: a nickname is not as personal as a petname, it’s a name you share with others.

An interesting thing that the article sort of hints at is that these kinds of systems have a fairly smooth range of operating points between globally unique and centralized vs decentralized petnames. The article’s example of the bizdir local business directory is somewhere in between these extremes. It sort of turns Zooko’s triangle into more like a fan, where the “human friendly” point is fixed and there’s an arc describing the tradeoffs, from personal through local to global.

How can a petname system function at the global+centralized point, so it could replace the DNS? It needs to pass the “billboard test”: I type in a name I saw on a billboard and I get to the right place. (It might be a multipart name like a postal address or DNS name, with an extra “edge name” or two to provide enough disambiguating context.) I imagine that an operating system supplier might provide a few preconfigured petnames (well, it probably includes its own petname so the software can update itself securely), a lot like its preconfigured PKIX CA certificates. These petnames would refer to orgs like the “bizdir”, or Verisign, or Nominet, that act as nickname registries. Your collection of petnames is in effect your personal root zone, and the preconfigured petnames are in effect the default TLDs. There would inevitably be something like the CA/Browser forum to mediate between OS suppliers and nickname registries: a petname ICANN.

I wrote an older iteration of these ideas over a decade ago (https://dotat.at/@/2012-02-28-path-names-in-a-rootless-dns.h...). Those notes have a bit too much DNS braindamage, but I included some curious anti-DNS discussion: How you might make use of reaching names by multiple paths? What might it look like to have a shared context for names that is not global but is national or regional or local?

Check out Backchannel[0] if you're interested in an implementation of a petname system for globally-unique symmetric cryptographic keys.

[0]: https://www.inkandswitch.com/backchannel/

Seems like a typo here that affects the meaning:

> Even though Ben is trusting that caller ID is correct, he can't imagine any reason why someone would be trying to phish him to authorize a topping change

So, a malicious entity can poison the petnames that others see, but only if prefixed by their own first? So people will learn not to trust them, I guess… but as usual with trust, they can be 99% correct and poison a specific one (eg claim a certain number is a well-known rich guy, and impersonate them)

The bigger issue is that people will need to be careful not to give embarrassing or compromising nicknames to people in their addressbooks.

I had considered using these personal contact list display names as default names for when people accept invites, but the problem is that they’ll know the inviting user had them as “that crazy pooky bob”

I think perhaps the PoW/PoS solution to byzantine generals (as used by Ethereum, for example) can and does solve the Zooko's triangle problem via things like ENS.

I don't anticipate that end users will be able to ingest or cope with the mental model involved with the correct usage of the system described in TFA.

I have crazy idea to produce mnemonic rules for every DID, maybe fancy-AI tech would help

I propose an implementation of these petnames by sharing directory access through mutually trusted brokers, whose identity is proven by certificates and whose location is discovered through a standardized directory service protocol. I think we can make huge strides by working with the ITU here — if we can convince them IP is the next big thing, then we might not end up being chained to the OSI netstack for the first release.