Building a decentralized name system on top of IRC

Neat, its always good to see people experimenting on a better DNS system. As others have mentioned, there are alternative systems to IRC, and I think you should consider them and what system of incentives are created by what choices you make.

You are using someone elses infrastructure, and even if you have done everything possible to minimize their overhead, you are still planning to use them for free. I think the other suggestions made here regarding options all have merits that I am not qualified to speak on; but I do know that decentralized/federated DNS is something highly sought after in bitcoin circles like on stackernews and nostr. You could use nostr very similarly to how you use it with your current implementation; I would very much love to use it to make remote access to services on my home network more accessible, and to allow others to use those services as well. There is a built in userbase of people that would like to host everything from cloud backups to online marketplaces to browser games, but using a centralized DNS is simply not an answer for them.

There's a list of public bootstrap nodes, similar to how Tor bootstraps. Nodes report their own IPs as part of a signed (and timestamped) record, which can change over time. Once you've found one node, you can query it for information about its peers. Because connection information ("dialinfo") is signed, it can be re-shared with other peers.

There's also support for nodes that don't have public IPs at all, which connect to the network via some other node acting as a relay. In this case, they report the relay's node ID.

I really don’t understand the “why” here. As a toy project it’s interesting but the actual justification to actually use IRC seems to come after the implementation.

This isn’t derived from the stability of IRC itself but the network operators as there are many holes not accounted for.

You’re not guaranteed a channel on IRC networks. A network owner may decide to remove it or, if using Services, transfer ownership if someone requests. Same for nicks and other things.

I’d also be willing to bet the network operators did not sign up to host a database for free for some stranger online either.

This is a really interesting project! I'm very inclined to get my hands on it and try to use it for something, mainly as a way to circumvent WebRTC traversal. I really have trouble with the TURN server scheme as a way to connect obfuscated machines. That part makes WebRTC feel "decentralized, UNTIL...", whereas your scheme seems more "decentralized, IF NECESSARY...", which feels less like a potential roadblock and more like a potential emergency use-case.

I get why people are concerned about using other people's infra for this kind of thing. But I do see a use-case for that as a backup. I don't think I'd ever implement something like this without running my own server as the enforced source instance for my apps so long as my server was running. If every other IRC server wanted to prevent this kind of scheme from working on their machines, I certainly wouldn't hold it against them. But I imagine that if other people wanted to run a P2P app, they might have their own IRC instances and would be accommodating of my downtime, as I feel like I would be accommodating of theirs. Different strokes, and all, but I definitely see how this would be pretty analogous to regular IRC usage, as far as administration and data, so I don't have any particular grudge against it - at least not without looking at what kind of traffic tsunami it could eventually cause.

The gnunet name system (GNS) would be such a replacement for DNS.