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The Human DNS

Reach everyone everywhere without incumberance

Updated November 25, 2024 • November 13, 2024

Every founder-type keeps a list of ideas whose time has not yet come.

Some are decent. Many are terrible.

But there is this problem that has been nagging me for a while. The root of several sleepless nights over the last few years, I think it’s time:

Almost.

Humans in a digital sea

The Big Idea

You should be able to connect with anyone through any medium—voice, text, video, images, synchronous, asynchronous, whatever—without legacy infrastructure and proprietary networks getting in your way.

If you’re open to phone calls, I should be able to dial your e-mail address.

(Read that again.)

If you’re open to receiving packages, I should be able to ship something addressed to your Instagram handle and it will be delivered wherever you want it… which may be elsewhere if you do not know me.

If you are open to verbing, I should be able to verb at you—and the middleware should know what to do based on who you are to me, and me to you. And vice versa.

We’ve been conditioned to accept that our digital identities and communications media are not truly our own. They currently belong to phone companies, social media giants, and a whole lot of inertia.

Many of you are thinking, “Yeah? What’s the problem?”

I think that sentiment is about to break.

How We Got Here

Computers run numbers. Humans tell stories. Both prefer their native protocols.

The Human Network Interface

To communicate beyond shouting distance, humans need devices and networks. Their evolution has shaped how we think about connecting for generations.

Every device—landline, smartphone, computer—has a physical unique identifier (IMEI, MAC Address, etc.). When that device connects to a network, the network assigns an address where it can receive connections (Phone Number, IP Address, etc.).

Want to connect with someone? You just need their address.

Easy, right? (Right?)

Exchanges and Places

From the late 1800s through the 1960s, placing a phone call was human-scale. Callers would pick up a handset and be greated by a real-life operator.

At the network grew, so did its complexity, and friendly names were becoming less available. Exchanges like “Pennsylvania 6-5000”—a mnemonic that translated to PE6-5000, or 736-5000 became highly coveted over numbers that had no alphanumeric meaning.

As the U.S. moved to all-number calling, people resisted. It felt “less human”.

Area codes needed to be invented, pushing numbers from easily-rememberable 7-digits to 10-digit let me write that down. Later, country codes.

Why 7 digits?

Thankfully, network engineers had the sense to keep numbers human-scale at seven digits because, as brain experiments have shown, most humans can remember a seven digit number between reading it out of the whitepages and rolling it out on a rotary phone in a single take.


Companies, understanding the power of easy-to-remember phone numbers, rushed to secure phone-spellings to dominate an industry. (1-800-FLOWERS, 1-800-MATTRESS, etc.)

Phone numbers became identities. Something like a callsign, owned by a private company. Telcos suddenly found themselves with a lot more control. (Still do.)

Even today, your landline cannot* come with you if you move too far away. Landlines are physically tied to one exchange (e.g., PE6) and cannot be ported to another. In the 1990s, Congress forced the telcos to allow homeowners to switch telephone providers and keep their numbers, but this can only be done at the local exchange level… and is only possible if multiple telcos service the exchange.

*Well, actually...

You can port your landland to a mobile phone or a VOIP-based number, but it's not the same as having the same copper hard-line between your home and the exchange where the telephone still works when the power goes out.

For those of you saying you have done this, your cable/internet/telephone provider likely installed a module with a backup battery that, every year or so, will be the source of this mysterious chirping sound coming from your network closet, or wherever your Internet lives in your home, to let you know that the battery is dying and needs to be replaced. That battery is there to allow phonecalls to still go through even if the main power is out, like it did in the olden times when the telephone company powered your telephone.

You're welcome for solving that mystery.


Big Telecom Is Not Your Friend

In the early days of mobile phones, customers had to surrender their numbers when changing carriers. While it was technically possible to port numbers, telecoms aggressively fought against it because they could keep customers captured in profitable contracts for years.

Don't Lose My Number

Suggested soundtrack:

This 40 year-old banger still resonates because phone numbers are not yet the anachronism they should be.


Finally in 2004, Congress required telcos to enable wireless number porting nationwide.

Within the first 12 months, US customers ported 8.5 million phone numbers.

Wireless providers then came up with a new incentive to snare customers: they charged more for calls between networks than for calls “in-network”. This applied pressure on friends and family to all consolidate on one carrier and away from competitors. If you were on a different network than all of your friends, you might find yourself out of the loop because reaching you was more costly. (Note this paradigm—you’ll see it again.)

While telco shenanigans continue, they are increasingly less material.

Thanks to Net Neutrality (and, before that, the threat of Net Neutrality keeping telcos and ISPs on their best behavior), network providers win customers today by providing interoperable, high-quality service for fair prices.

This is how basic utilities should work, provided the FCC continues to do its job and protect the interests of its citizenry.

This is not at all how social networks work today.

Social Network Companies are Anti-Social

“Senator, we run ads.” Mark Zuckerberg famously said, explaining how Meta/Facebook makes its billions.

More ad-inventory means more revenue. More ad-revelance means more engagement means higher prices. Thus, algorithms maximize for relevant-eyeball-minutes. Not for customer satisfaction, not for socially responsible content, and not for anything other than goosing “engagement” metrics.

(I hope this isn’t a surprise to you—your attention is the product!)

Just like the telcos want to keep you on your network, social media companies want to keep you captive on their networks. Why would they support off-platform messaging unless forced?

In fact, Facebook supported 3rd-party chat protocols in 2008, but they shut it off in 2015.

Like the congressional act requiring phone number portability 18 years prior, the EU’s 2022 Digital Markets Act now requires Meta/Facebook to play nicely with others.

A good start, but not far enough.

If I opt-out of a popular app, receiving updates from my friends, family, and contacts becomes expensive. (Remember that earlier point about telcos using social pressure to consolidate subscribers?)

Why you should be extra-annoyed

Inter-network messaging has been a trivial feature, with safe and stable protocols such as XMPP/Jabber being widely used since 1999.

You used to be able to direct message a gmail account from your Facebook account! Both companies quietly phased out those capabilities as social networks crossed the chasm from a niche activity to a global one.

This is not unique to social networks: Other big tech companies, like Apple, have resisted the rich text message standard (RCS) in favor of iMessage... although Apple did good in disintermediating telcos in allowing you to make calls and send messages with an e-mail address via iMessage. Half credit!

This is also not say that there isn't value in having quarantined networks. In captive activities, say like in-game video game chat, needs to exist outside of those experiences. But, interoperability isn't the point here. Social networks are meant to go broad. Video game lobbies are meant to be narrow.

The point is: because it costs money, time, and effort, regulation helps ensure companies do the consumer-friendly thing instead of the more profitable thing. Companies are perfectly capable of innovating under constraint.


Almost Hyperbole

Imagine if Fedex, UPS, DHL, and USPS each used their own addressing scheme for the same address; and, if senders didn’t use the correct format, the parcel service would refuse delivery.

These all represent the same location:

If people had to keep track of multiple address encodings for the same physical location, they would lose their minds.

Imagine if your e-mail worked like social networks do, where you could only e-mail people within the same domain name or with people who used the same e-mail client.

Yet we continue to tolerate this in social networking apps. (For now.)

More networked, polygonal humans

Naming People At Scale

In olden times, you were given a name. Leo.

Two Leos in town? One would be Leo di Ser Piero (Leo, the son of Piero) to disambiguate. Or by occupation. Leo Thatcher.

Famous? Well then, you might be known as the Leo from your small hamlet. Leonardo da Vinci.

Early computer network administrators followed this very human naming convention to help you find friends and colleagues. Want to message your classmate Leo? You would message user leo.

The Internet eventually patched together these smaller networks. Want to reach the Leo from Caprio? leo@caprio.it. The polymath? Try leo@vinci.it.

It doesn’t matter the institution or the software: if you’ve got the right address, the e-mail will go through.

Beyond Institutions

As people began to use computers socially, they craved cyberspaces untethered from [vo|edu]cational brick and mortar organizations. Capitalism dutifully filled the need, building technology for the masses and shoveling much of the Internet’s inner workers under the rug.

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like America Online, Prodigy, and MSN led the charge. Personal home pages came next through services like Geocities, AngelFire, and LiveJournal. These inspired the next generation of social platforms like MySpace and Friendster. Finally, we arrived at today’s full-throated “social networks” like Facebook, TikTok, and Snapchat.

Turns out there’s a lot of money to be made where the people are.

Missed Opportunities and Social Consolidation

In the early days, ISPs used to offer e-mail for free; but, like early mobile phone portability, those e-mail addresses didn’t always last beyond the service contract, which for reasons that should be now obvious, creates problems.

In response, big tech companies started offering free e-mail accounts (@yahoo.com, @gmail.com, etc.) to attract users permenantly; few of them thought to invest meaningfully beyond one-on-one chat.

“Social network” companies worked to fill this void, enabling people to broadcast posts to their friends. This “timeline” turned out to be a very sticky feature, taking social networks (particularly Facebook) mainstream.

The timeline—an aggregated feed of what people had to say—was a wonderful innovation: a low-cost, convenient way for people to stay up-to-date with those closest to each other.

But… there are a few catches:

  1. People do not have full control over their identity
    While I managed to claim @gruen on Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and others, if I lose my handle due to social engineering, user error, or the CEO/Owner’s whim, I am totally out of luck. (Good luck getting tech support to help!) Further, I am only able to communicate with people and see people’s content from within that particular social network… a huge downgrade from what e-mail could do decades earlier.

  2. People do not have full control over what they see
    Timelines, as the term suggests, used to be a simple chronology. This was fine in the early days; but, as posting habits became uneven between people, companies realized they could create a better experience if they did a bit of curation. “The Algorithm” was born, “helping” people see the things that “the algorithm” deemed most relevant. At best it is a well-intended black box with no direct controls, driven by what people “engaged” with… another huge downgrade from what e-mail and listservs, online forums, and BBSs have done for decades.

  3. People do not have full control over what they post
    Social networks hew towards “General Audiences”, with sentiments and biases that reflect whatever the company deems “acceptable”. By way of example with Meta’s products (Facebook, Instagram, etc.): Woman in bikini with a handbra in a suggestive pose? Acceptable! Breastfeeding with a partially-exposed nipple? Inappropriate. Hyperrealistic statues or paintings of topless women? Acceptable! Actual topless women? Shadow ban. Topless man? No problem (unless the auto-moderator thinks they might not be male, in which case 10-day posting suspension without appeal). What if I accidentally post something that causes my account to be suspended or deactivated? This is exile without trial.

Commercial social networking companies not only own people’s online identities, but their content consumption.

This is even more control than what the telcos have!

Redistributing Control

The Internet was built to be resilient. Distributed networks, universal protocols, and hard encryption enable people to connect with each other on their own terms, even if large swaths of the network were taken out by tactical thermonuclear strikes. And yet, we find our personal lives in the care of only a few publicly-traded companies and their Terms of Service.

Big tech companies pushed free e-mail accounts and social profiles to hook us into their wholly-controlled ecosystems, a move that indirectly promotes their service to others.

“I’m gruen on Venmo, or my GMail is gruen.”

But, if Google decided to shut down all @gmail.com accounts on Friday, or suddenly went out of business, what would you do? While very unlikely, I remember saying this about MySpace.

For those who have their own domain name, a universally-reachable identitier that they control, this is no problem: just swap out your e-mail service provider, migrate your old e-mails, change the MX records on your domain name, and keep on trucking.

This works for websites and e-mails… why wouldn’t it work for social accounts?

Well, it can!

Universal Human Identifier

What’s Next?

The solution is actually quite simple: just write some protocols.

Protocols are Everything

In addition to supporting e-mail and web protocols for institutions, network administrators will often allow users to host their own webpages for the world to see—a convention still actively used.

For example, the site http://wyden.senate.gov belongs to exactly whose you would expect it to: US Senator Ron Wyden, acting in his Congressional Capacity.

But the same locator with a different verb (i.e., protocol) can also be used for him to communicate on a social network, like so: @wyden.senate.gov.

Note the protocols: http:// and at:// (@). The first protocol gets his website. The second protocol (which your web browser doesn’t yet support, but will likely soon) gets you his social feed where you can interact with it as you would expect.

Same wyden.senate.gov identifier. Different expected action.

This convention scales incredibly well.

A Universal Home for You

You don’t need to be an institution to buy your own domain name.

When you buy a domain name, you own the rights to use it forever—as long as you keep paying for it.

Depending on the top-level domain, TLD (e.g., .com, .us, .lol, .stream), a domain name can cost you as less than a cup of coffee.

gruen.us costs ~$10/year.

And you, as an individual, should buy one.

Domain names acts as universally identifier that you can take with you anywhere and everywhere. You can use it for e-mail, for your website, and (eventually) your social networks. (And more!)

Eventually, that is, except for BlueSky, which will support your domain-based handle right now.

They are the tip of the spear for what I think will be a mainstream reversion to the initial promise of an open, user-controlled Internet.

Open Protocols, Open Networks, Open Portability

BlueSky looks a lot like early Twitter; but, if you spend a bit of time looking under the hood, it is far more interesting.

When you sign up, the system provisions you with a very long, unique personal identifier (called a DID) which makes it easy for the computers to identify you, and a free handle on bsky.social (e.g., gruen.bsky.social) which makes it easier for humans. It also creates a database, just for you, to store all the content you create.

In this, BlueSky is a short-form social media application built on top of the AT protocol, which is meant to scale and be useful beyond the application.

This also means you can port any part this to your own domain, or another ATProto-compatible server.

Want to change your handle? Keep your DID and your social graph. Want to start afresh but keep the same handle? Drop your DID and reassign your handle to the new one. Want to move all of your content to another server because you no longer like the Terms and Conditions? Easy peasy.

This means if BlueSky shuts down (or is bought by a megalomaniac), your identity and social graph remain yours and you can move it as you please.

Caveat: doing this is still a bit rough if you’re non-technical, but the ecosystem is feverishly working to make this accessible to non-technical folks as well. For what it’s worth, all of this is far easier to do than what’s common in the “Web3”/Crypto world.

For Example…

When Senator Wyden leaves Congress, he can preserve his social graph when he changes his handle (from wyden.senate.gov to whatever he choses) because his DID (did:plc:ydtsvzzsl6nlfkmnuooeqcmc), the computer-readable identifier, is independent of his handle. Everyone who followed him will still followed him, and they will all see that his handle has been updated without anyone (except Senator Wyden) having to do anything at all.

(And because replies to him are associated with the DID and not his handle, all of those old @-mentions will remain intact.)

When a reporter moves from one news organization to another, they can change their handle (e.g., reporter.nytimes.com ==> reporter.theonion.com) without losing their audience.

Neat, huh?

Possibilities

Imagine being able to register your domain-based universal human identifier with the United States Postal Service, which could always route mail to your current address. This is especially useful if you’re someone always on the move.

This is how you might send me a postcard:

To: gruen.us
From: Your Secret Admirer

Imagine being able to check out from an online retailer and the only thing I need to provide them is gruen.us. The retailer could then verb gruen.us for payment authorization through my preferred payment method (which I could set up to auto-approve or manually-approve, depending on the vendor), verb for a way to deliver receipt and shipping updates, and any other verb that gruen.us supports for this interaction. (e.g., Register transaction with the FTC.)

Imagine being able auto-reject bulk mailers, avoiding the paper and delivery waste from all clothing catalogs sent to your door. The trees we could save… not to mention the fuel and recycling costs.

Imagine being able to silence all inbound phones calls except for people you’re supposed to be talking with that day. (All others automatically route to voicemail.)

Imagine being able to write to your congressional representatives, and for them to know whether or not you are an actual constituent.

Imagine being able to privately share family photos without having to rely on a company that actively trains its algorithms on your personal content.

Imagine being able to switch the vendor that verbs your verb if they lose your business or go out of business, without having to update everything else.

Imagine not having to rush to the latest Internet service to try to claim your preferred short username (e.g., gruen) before someone else does.

Writing protocols on top of universal identifiers unlocks all of this and more.

No Longer A Stretch

There is more to this than just universal identification: decoupling identity from network, server, software vendor, algorithm, security, and data store means that people can control—if they want to—every part of their digital stack.

And they won’t need a Computer Science degree to do it.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the gentleman credited with inventing the literal World Wide Web (WWW), would likely agree. While his initial efforts with the Solid project didn’t immediately catch on, I think he was just a little too early.

(Been there!)

This was the promise of the early internet. But, the technical requirements to do it effectively was both inaccessible to most people (who are non-technical) and useful to the multi-billion dollar companies profiting from the dot-com boom. But, we’re reaching a boiling point where people are paying more attention, and the technologies are becoming more accessible.

People are becoming less interested in corporate interests and billionaires’ agendas controlling their algorithms.

In this I know I’m not alone, and our numbers are increasing.

How Big Tech Can Get Involved

There’s no reason why LinkedIn couldn’t offer up your LinkedIn URL as a universal lookup (e.g., @gruen.linkedin.com), and they probably should.

If offered, I would tie my LinkedIn ID back to my domain name and/or DID to make it easier for people to find me and to disambiguate me from other people who I could be confused for.

For the first social media company that does this, they might find themselves as a preferred universal lookup for some people; or, the preferred universal reference given a certain context. (e.g., here I am in my professional capacity: gruen.linkedin.com, but I use gruen.us in my personal capacity.)

Universal lookups are compatible with the stated values of these social networks… but less so their perceived commercial interests.

Phone companies also fought cellphone number porting, but then later used it in their own marketing campaigns:

“Keep Your Number, Change Your Carrier”

Consumers are ready for the change. Business will have to compete again… and this benefits everyone.

Conclusion

My idea for a Human DNS was just… DNS all along.

The trick was building the protocols and taking people along for the ride. As we’re witnessing, BlueSky and the AT Protocol have found a viable foothold, and I am very optimistic about the direction they are going in.

For me, part of the genius of ATProto is its comically long, immutable, and larger-than-human-scale (and therefore totally meaningless to most people) DID that lets computers do their thing, while complementing that computer-scale identifier with a mutable, human-scale-name that’s chosen by its human owner.

It’s Early Days

The good news is that there are plenty of good domains to be had out there, with more TLDs being issued every few months, driving the price down even further. (If you’re interested, gruen.lol is available and can be had for about $30/year!)

For example, I recently bought two dictionary-word domain names on dictionary-word TLDs that work interchangably in the form of X.Y and Y.X for less than $30 total.

What a world we live in.

If you’re concerned, I recommend hedging against the future with a domain name that works for you and your family.

If I’m wrong? You’ve now got a cool domain name you can use for something.

If I’m right? Well, you’ll want to use it almost everywhere and keep it forever.

Additional Reading

My Human DNS Settings

My DID is did:plc:3kexp5524dhn5g25z2eeta56. Unless something goes horribly wrong, that won’t change.

My Handle is gruen.us. I probably won’t change it, but if I do, everything will still work as it did before. You can look up that new handle here, which your social client (e.g., BlueSky) does for you automatically.

For the most part, the only thing you need to remember about me is gruen.us. Right now it supports AT Proto and HTTP requests, but over time I expect it to be able to, ahem, handle much more.


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