So I think we should make some terms clear (just for the sake of
clarity). We have, I guess, three different naming-system ideas
floating here: petnames, (distibuted) namecoin-ish, and centralized
consensus-based - rough summary.

Some months ago, the petname system interested me enough that I started
to write a proposal for it. At this point, it's wound up in bitrot.
Though I'd spent a bit of time working on it, there was no comprehensive
way to accomplish it.

I too started writing a petname proposal only to have it wind up on the backburner.

In a nutshell, there would be a sort of pseudo-DNS that allow a given .onion to define a petname through a file on their site. For example, somename.onion/petname.txt could shorten the address to bettername.pet. The pseudo-DNS would check if a hidden service is alive once every few days, and if the onion is down for thirty days, the petname is freed up for someone else to use. This has the side effect of promoting good onion upkeep.

I like the idea of federating hidden services and eepsites into one petname system, but not sure how possible/practical that would be. Of course, there's really nothing keeping an independent actor from making this and offering it as a firefox plugin for those who might want to use it.

Thoughts?

~Griffin