Something like Lemmy could form a pretty good foundation. Onion routing already has created a “parallel internet” that depends 0% on DNS, and Lemmy instances would federate today (with whitelisted federation) via /etc/hosts with no DNS involved. It wouldn’t work well, it would have problems, but if someone actually tried to make it work moderately well, the whole model of “admins running servers which it’s your problem to get connected to, and then they know how to federate to each other because all the admins talk with each other” could work itself around over time into something that actually had some pretty strong robustness to it.
There are other attempts (Holepunch, Freenet, all that jazz), but actually Tor and Fedi things probably have the best claims to being able to turn into something realistic that didn’t need DNS, over time. You just couldn’t talk to it until you set your machine up to be able to get the initial connection going, but that’s not fatal, the whole internet used to be a lot like that way back when.
The web is still heavily centralized.
It’s also much bigger than it was back in the day.
Even a fraction of a percent of people using decentralized services is probably bigger than the early web ever was.
it is. it won’t change overnight though.
Let start from root of problem. Network with name internet entirely centralized and controlled by specific companies and people.
If someone has a suggestion/link on how a decentralized web grows past DNS I’m all ears.
Something like Lemmy could form a pretty good foundation. Onion routing already has created a “parallel internet” that depends 0% on DNS, and Lemmy instances would federate today (with whitelisted federation) via /etc/hosts with no DNS involved. It wouldn’t work well, it would have problems, but if someone actually tried to make it work moderately well, the whole model of “admins running servers which it’s your problem to get connected to, and then they know how to federate to each other because all the admins talk with each other” could work itself around over time into something that actually had some pretty strong robustness to it.
There are other attempts (Holepunch, Freenet, all that jazz), but actually Tor and Fedi things probably have the best claims to being able to turn into something realistic that didn’t need DNS, over time. You just couldn’t talk to it until you set your machine up to be able to get the initial connection going, but that’s not fatal, the whole internet used to be a lot like that way back when.
DNS can be decentralized: https://www.nlnetlabs.nl/projects/unbound/about/