Yes, it is known as "nomadic identity":
https://codeberg.org/ap-next/ap-next/src/branch/main/nomadpub.md
this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2026
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Hell yeah! That's awesome! Thank you for the link @silverpill@mitra.social
We have IPFS already, which is a federated file system which doesn't depend on domains, but has content hashes. And we also have BitTorrent with magnet links, also independent of domains. So something similar could be implemented and I think it would be neat.
youll need to be more specific on what you mean by 'federating', but the answer is generally, no. domains are fundamentally core to the infrastructure.
its like asking can we have a phone system without phone numbers.... suuure, but then its not really a phone system anymore, is it?
can we segment user addressing from server addressing? potentially.. thats where it get interestingly complex.
atproto from bluesky is a protocol exactly defined to fix this problem
unfortunately, atproto doesnt scale horizontally as AcitivytPub does. so, really, no one should use it.
atproto has no problem scaling. It's Bluesky, a platform that wants to see all the network, that has issues scaling
It's still at a very early stage, and they do have hosting costs in mind.
It's the first proposal I've seen trying to solve the problem
im not saying the fediverse isnt without its serious challenges. that said;
sorry, not letting bluesky havin my keys.. but you do you.
i just dont understand people putting their effort into a piece of shit, corporate backed protocol like AT when AP is already more mature, in use, and with large contingent of active developers.
its portability is at the whim of those running the system. its still not your data. you can take your pod.. and go where? all those other routers that will startup just any day now? after 3 years i think there's 2 routers.. and they dont talk to eathother. hilarious.
any day now!
its just twitter 2.0 with more steps and all the same executives.
i just dont understand people putting their effort into a piece of shit, corporate backed protocol like AT when AP is already more mature, in use, and with large contingent of active developers.
Stupidity. It's the answer to most confusion about why "the masses" do what they do.
What problem would be solved by doing that?
They might be thinking of the problem where you can't change the domain of an instance, you have to start a whole new one under the new domain. And if you lose a domain, someone else can start an instance and receive your federation traffic.
But changing away from domain names entirely doesn't solve those problems.
I think this could be solved with a migration window though, and a proper migration path in code. You spin up a new instance, clone your data. Then on old instance it sends a .well-known redirect message, or 301s for everything. Then receiving servers whenthey get that know to update all of their references. You keep it up for however long you think you should for all of the other severs to update.
For moves, yes. If you lose the domain you can't do that.
I think even then that's a solvable problem though. A unique hash of your server so if you move and start refederating the same process could happen. It'd require more work on the individual instance admin, but could be done
I would imagine that would require all platforms to implement this change in concert e.g. Piefed and Lemmy, all the fedi micro-blogging clients.
Doesn't sound like a viable proposition.
IE, it is a protocol-level change and would require modification of that specification (ActivityPub).
They wouldn't have to do it all on day one, everything keeps working fine the way it is, this would be an addition, right?
There's some functionality in Mastodon that's not in GoToSocial, for example, but that's not keeping me from living a rich, varied, activitypubbed life, so to speak.
Plus all these platforms are open source, so if people want the functionality, they can make it happen.
How else would you connect to other servers?
That's an excellent question that I'd love to know as well actually. :D
usually the people asking this end up at nostr... as close to true anonymity as you can get and all the worst of humanity that goes along with it.
friends dont let friends use nostr.
Every time I’ve ever tried Nostr, it’s just been a bunch of crypto bros promoting their scams.
Case in point:
Yes that's exactly what he said, all the worst of humanity. (partial sarcasm. maybe.)
Probably not worth it but it would be great supporting TOR-only instances
Reticulum has aspects that you might like, that solves the problem of dependence on domain names, allowing different types of devices to communicate, but also include TCP/IP options. It's pretty cool.