What Macbroadcast is referring to is that if you use one of the names I provide (a DNS name ending in .pagekite.me), your online identity becomes dependent on access to my service, which costs money and is, like any other business, at risk of going bankrupt or getting sued or experiencing some other catastrophe.

So if you are concerned about independence, you don’t want to use a .pagekite.me name. But that is actually under your control: you can buy your own domain name and use that instead (our service supports this). And ultimately, since it’s open source, you can host the entire solution on your own hardware if that is what you want.

Of course, then you’re still relying on your DNS registrar… it’s actually quite hard to be completely independent on today’s Internet. We all have to decide how we balance independence vs. convenience and there’s no easy answer there.

The FreedomBox project and a few others are working on some of these issues, but they are really quite complicated.