Web Numbers
49 comments
·June 27, 2025susam
candrewlee
I wholeheartedly agree. Bluesky had an interesting idea for identification using a domain you control to verify your account by adding a TXT DNS record for _atproto.
The problem is that it’s only a rented domain and thus a rented username. My DNS provider Porkbun offered a 5 year deal, but I would pay for much longer if I could.
jiangplus
How about Ethereum Name Service (ENS)?
jadbox
ENS is still a rented domain, as far as you will lose access without recurring payments. In this case it's rented out by a network of nodes following a set of rules, instead of a single entity.
areyourllySorry
they're just as supported as jpegxl. oh, and you need to pay rent for them as well, even though their costs are even smaller.
PaulHoule
There's a kind of "freedom is slavery" or "free as in beer vs free as in speech" mechanic involved with self-hosting. At the end of the day people really appreciate Facebook being free of charge and seem to feel really resentful that they might spend $5-$10 a year to maintain a domain.
nixpulvis
I would honestly love to see government involvement in assigning public usage domain names. Phone numbers are much more limited than the domain space, but those too are really in the domain of "public good". So much infrastructure depends on reliable and stable phone numbers and email addresses.
exiguus
IANA is basically the US gov. All RIRs are also mostly governmental controlled.
nixpulvis
Yea, but I mean like a .gov registrar to assign a single domain per SSN or something like that.
blharr
> I would honestly love to see government involvement
Is not a phrase you should use lightly... government involvement in anything is rife for mismanagement. At its reduction, a domain name is an agreement between people to use X address for Y purpose. What would this power even mean?
nixpulvis
Gives me a .person.gov domain for free, would be a good example.
dist-epoch
> prove our ownership using a private key.
What happens if you lose that private key?
aspenmayer
A proper implementation would probably use a quorum of validators to allow for key management updates. These are solved problems.
hahaxdxd123
Why should you not have to pay to rent the use of a public good?
zokier
The article is conveniently ignoring that getting your own IP block ranges from practically impossible (ipv4) to very involved (ipv6). And then you also need to figure out way to route traffic for that IP block; not all ISPs and hosting providers are willing to offer BGP sessions and whatnot. In any case it will be orders of magnitude more expensive than basic domain name and DNS hosting.
nixpulvis
Yea. While owning a domain record isn't bulletproof, owning an IP address AFAIK is much more complex and expensive.
If you own a domain, when your IP address changes it's generally a short migration.
al_borland
In the spirit of domains as a public good, mentioned in the article, couldn’t some organization procure a block of IPv6 IPs to distribute them and handle those hoops for everyone?
exiguus
You need very different hard- and software for that. How to become your own ISP[1] is a nice talk about that.
[1] https://media.ccc.de/v/2025-170-how-to-become-your-own-isp
zokier
Some organization like RIPE or ARIN? Both which are non-profits and whose main activity is to distribute IP (and AS) numbers
al_borland
I briefly looked at ARIN’s requirements before posting. I can’t just go request a single address, as I don’t think I meet any of these conditions.
- Have an IPv4 assignment from ARIN or one of its predecessors
- Intend to immediately be IPv6 multi-homed
- Have 13 end sites (offices, data centers, etc.) within one year
- Use 2,000 IPv6 addresses within one year
- Use 200 /64 subnets within one year
That’s what I was thinking an intermediary would be needed, unless they change their policies.
tptacek
Paying $2-$10/year for a non-premium name (which will be drastically easier for your readers to use than any IP address) seems strictly better than arranging for a VPS static IP and chaining the identity of your site onto that VPS provider forever. I'm not sure this is what IP address certificates are really meant for.
twiss
Is it easy/cheap to get a stable IP address? I would worry that if I just get any cheap VPS host, they might switch the IP address at any point, but I'm not sure how true that actually is.
roywiggins
And can you keep an IP address when switching providers? pretty much no, right?
espadrine
Easy yes. Even VPS providers need to maintain the IP, since your DNS typically points to that IP. You can also typically move the IP to another machine from the same provider.
But as a resut, VPS often have a different price for public IPs compared to private IPs. For instance, it costs €0.004/h per IP at Scaleway.
ricardo81
I've used dozens of VPS providers in the past, albeit 'low end' in this instance- they constantly change IP addresses because they're renting them, buying them, etc.
For IPv4 definitely a problem.
I maybe used around 100 VPS hosts, less well known ones beyong DO etc. I'd get a dozen IP change notices a year.
Case in point: https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/160162/aio-ip-related-ipv4...
nixpulvis
I like the idea of popularizing using IP addresses for personal sites. I don't like trying to rebrand them Web Numbers, since imo it accomplishes nothing but being potentially confusing.
The bigger issue is hosting these small web sites for people who are used to using platforms which make connecting with other users much more seamless.
Most people want to allow comments and replies at least sometimes and that becomes a bigger headache when you host yourself.
I'd love to see Yarn become a solution for one step setup for people. I'd be even more excited if it's done in a way which is modular enough to allow "power users" to customize the framework, and potentially even bring their own framework and integrate it with features provided by Yarn. For example, maybe I want my framework to do the markdown->HTML and templating, but I want to use the comment system from Yarn.
fuzzfactor
>>I like the idea of popularizing using IP addresses for personal sites.
I like that too, but I would have to figure there is a big-web where they just don't care what you & I like to begin with :\
"Zero trust" DNS is steadily closing in on Windows, and that can be a pretty significant portion of web users.
https://4sysops.com/archives/windows-11-zero-trust-dns-ztdns...
>ZTDNS enforces strict controls by default, blocking all network connections unless the IP address is resolved through a Protective DNS. As a result, computers are unable to connect to destinations using IP addresses directly.
Last year it was guinea-pigged:
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/networkingblog/anno...
Now the zthelper Service has been implanted inside Win 11 from a recent package, it's dormant but if you want to try it out there are some recommendations, closely accompanied by troubleshooting approaches:
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/networkingblog/anno...
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/networkingblog/trou...
Looks like trouble is very much to be expected, and it could take a while for enterprise to accommodate it. But once that point is reached I imagine a remote trigger would be pulled and the blast radius would increase dramatically to include all Windows, sometime after Windows 10 is no longer with us. Mowing down small-webs as collateral damage.
tolmasky
Is it explained somewhere how links are supposed to work, especially if the intended use case is that you would just be using your own "address book"? I guess the address book is just a bookmark (and not like a /etc/hosts-type thing?), such that people aren't sharing links that don't work with each other. But the alternative is that they're sharing IP links, which, unless I am misunderstanding, means you probably do have to memorize IP addresses, and... all of them? Otherwise every link you post to your latest blog post or whatever just looks like a bunch of inscrutable (scary) numbers to people?
9dev
It could work similar to @mention in social networks; you'd just need your user agent to display links to known numbers with the label from your address book. Which only works if you know that number already, but as the blog post mentions, that's also the case for telephone numbers and it doesn't bother anyone there. We're just used to never seeing IP addresses anymore.
tolmasky
But phone numbers are treated as relatively private, so they don't really face this problem. The few that aren't intended to be private, and meant to be broadcast, go out of their way to procure "memorable" phone numbers (such as, say, 1-800-333-4444 vs. 1-800-293-3841, the "vanity domains" of phone numbers, so that you can see it on a billboard and still remember it when you get home). You don't however normally broadcast individual people's phone numbers (like tweeting your friends number and saying "my buddy just said the funniest thing, call him here: 111-3333"). On the other hand, sharing is one of the primary purposes of for links and URLs. In this IP universe, the tweet is now "My buddy just wrote the best thing https://[2001:db8:1234:5678:9abc:def0:1234:5678]/blah". If this only looks reasonable to people that happen to have already visited this site and recorded it in their address book, then I'm worried it will quickly lose favor vs. "traditional domains". I will admit that I am not super familiar with the goals of the small web, and perhaps they want websites to behave more like IRC rooms, but I don't think sharing new content to a new audiences is against the the principles of the original web (given the emphasis on links). Again though, I am totally willing to believe that I am misunderstanding the goals here.
al_borland
Not just scary because they are long numbers, but scary because they will take the user to some unknown place. If someone’s blog links to a domain I recognize, I feel safe clicking it. If a blog is linking to a random IP address, it then becomes a question of how much I trust the person behind the poster, and their ability to secure their server… and the security of my own browser.
exiguus
In my opinion, it's much more complicated to register an IP with RIPE than registering any domain. Becoming a RIPE NCC member is hard.
Sure, you can work around it and route subnets or IPs from an existing IP or use NAT. But if I understand it correctly (please correct me if I'm wrong), you need a VPN or another way to tunnel it through the public network.
So you are in the same situation as with domains when you use an existing IP that someone else has registered.
exiguus
If you have a lot of time, you can become your own ISP[1].
[1] https://media.ccc.de/v/2025-170-how-to-become-your-own-isp
qudat
> Domain names are tiny little rows in a database
What about the infrastructure to maintain it? What about the dns traffic volume?
This feels very reductionist and probably more expensive then led to believe
lwansbrough
> 4,294,967,296 IPv4 addresses
> 8,000,000,000 humans
Alright everyone choose your opponent.
Kwpolska
IPv4 addresses are scarce. IPv6 addresses are not easy to remember, and not supported everywhere.
Has the author never heard of shared hosting providers? This already exists. Those tend to be extremely cheap, often cheaper than a VPS, and do not require remembering IPs. You share one IP with many people, and the domain name and the Host header lets the server tell the sites apart. A .com is under $10/month. There are/were also free domains.
ricardo81
Exciting language, a ctrl+f for 'phishing' returned nothing.
Then there's IPv4 exhaustion with that in hand:
I could see phishing being a problem for any notable website.
But having certs for IPs does seem like a nice option without paying for a domain.
> Domain names are tiny little rows in a database. They cost next-to-nothing to set up and maintain. There’s absolutely no reason why they couldn’t be a public good, paid for from the public purse.
I don’t mind paying for the domain name so much but I do mind the fact that even after paying for the domain name, there is no guarantee of having full control over the domain name. I do mind that even after spending money year after year, we are only renting a domain name, with the possibility of the domain name being taken away from us anytime!
I used to be a big proponent of hosting your email address at your own domain name. But then I had a very unpleasant experience of losing my domain name several years ago, for no fault of mine, due to anti-malware operations completely unrelated to my website. After that incident, I am not so sure!
I have written more about that incident here:
https://susam.net/sinkholed.html
I wish the mainstream World Wide Web were built around the concept of owning a domain name where we could prove our ownership using a private key.