Beaker: Request: add custom-domain-names

[anefzaoui]

This more of a feature request, where as the Beaker community grows larger, a better solution to make "relevant" and "popular" beaker websites known and easily accessible is to add the ability to choose a domain name sort of like the nickname logic in websites where the first to get the nickname is the one who exclusively owns it, until a month after the user deletes their profile, whereas it would be in Beaker until a month after the creator un-publishes their website.

WDYT?

[pfrazee]

Would this differ from DNS? We do support DNS with dat.

[DaniellMesquita]

.bit and .eth address can be a thing.

[anefzaoui]

Would this differ from DNS? We do support DNS with dat.

Nah I'm talking about words just like actual domain names in the centralized web, say I want to publish my website under the dat://ahmed.nefzaoui or dat://ahmednefzaoui.bkr and such examples :)

Eventually there will be websites with mass numbers of peers and I think it would be cool if users can easily remember how to access them and such.

[pfrazee]

@Plasmmer .bit and .eth are cool tech but not right for Beaker. We feel very strongly that Proof-of-Work consensus is too inefficient to become part of the Web platform. (see https://beakerbrowser.com/docs/inside-beaker/other-technologies.html#why-not-a-blockchain)

@anefzaoui we strongly considered that with something called the app scheme. The problem is that it would cause a lot of 404s. URLs have to be universally shareable. If a nickname isnt global, then people would copy-paste the nickname URLs and expect them to work.

Instead, we might be able to do some interesting UI things in the URL bar. For instance, with Installable Web Apps, we might be able to put a nice name in the rendering of the URL for installed apps/sites, so that it looks like...

dat:// [Ahmed's Website] /blog.html

And then when you click the URL bar, it reverts back to the full raw URL (for copy pasta).

[anefzaoui]

Humm, sad. I'm not sure I understand what exactly do you mean with nickname being or not being global. But I looked at it from a slightly technical point view where both full raw URL or unique nickname URL are strings made up from characters that can be picked by a logic in the browser..

[pfrazee]

Sorry, it's just not feasible to have shortnames without a registry system. You can use DNS by following this wiki: https://github.com/beakerbrowser/beaker/wiki/Authenticated-Dat-URLs-and-HTTPS-to-Dat-Discovery#proposal

[specious]

Looks like datprotocol/dat-dns is the module that queries https://<domain>/.well-known/dat on the HTTPS host to establish a dat:// address to a peer-to-peer version of a site requested as dat://<domain>.

Took me some research to figure all of this out.

[pfrazee]

@specious sorry that was a pain. Our documentation is still too scattered.

[specious]

I'm poking around. Looks like .well-known/dat hasn't yet been officially accepted into the well-known URI registry.

[pfrazee]

Yeah we haven't submitted it yet.

[specious]

It might become standard de facto 👍