Lexicons are based on domain names and publishing to the network.
All the lexicon.community lexicons look like community.lexicon.(some shared lexicon)
If you register example.com (making lexicons that look like com.example.mycooldata) and it gets widely adopted, but you lose access to the domain / don’t pay for registration, how concerned should you be? What happens?
A similar question I have is around how lexicons can change ownership/governance. If the community decides to standardize a lexicon (e.g. standard.site, lexicon.community) from an existing lexicon (likely owned by an app) can the app transfer ownership of the lexicon to another party. Needing to fork the lexicon and backfill every record or transfer ownership of the domain seems not the best.
Thanks for starting the conversation! If this happens, I think you should be moderately concerned. It’s a problem, but far from the end of the world for your app.
Lexicon NSIDs are a largely permissionless namespace. Anyone can publish and consume records under any given NSID (domain); they don’t need to own the domain. Ideally you should own the domain, of course, especially now that we have resolution, but that’s still only an informational developer tool, not a requirement.
A key part here is ecosystem consensus. If you own a domain, and publish records on a lexicon on that domain, and other people start to consume them, and publish their own, you’re building momentum and trust. If you lose the domain, all of that publishing and consuming still continues to work. If the domain’s new owners try to maliciously publish conflicting lexicon schemas, that won’t do a lot. Sure, a small minority of tools that aggressively resolve lexicons on the fly may break, but everything else will still work. (And if the new lexicons are backward-compatible, as ATProto says they’re supposed to be, then even those tools will still work.)
If the concern is security, the threat model here is unclear. The domain’s new owners won’t have access to any non-public data, or any apps or other services. Afaict the worst harm they could cause would be the partial DoS above on tools that aggressively resolve new lexicons on the fly. Which counts!…but is also relatively contained.
Losing a domain that you had lexicons on is obviously not good hygiene. Ideally, we don’t want it to happen. But the ecosystem can 1) choose to continue to use the original lexicons, and ignore any new ones that the new domain owner might publish, or 2) work together to migrate their records to new lexicons on a new domain. Both take work, 2 especially, but both are doable.