It seems that you should be able to change the default lifetime configuration in Kubo: https://github.com/ipfs/kubo/blob/master/docs/config.md#ipnsrecordlifetime
I wonder if I could get my VPS to republish the records then. Basically I find it wild how I can publish a CID, make that CID available over like 6 nodes, but then the IPNS record seems to all hinge on one machine. I’m trying to figure out how to improve that situation.
I share your bewilderment. It was my understanding that in terms of the DHT, IPNS records are just like provider records in so far as they’re distributed across the DHT using the XOR metric.
Granted, it is fundamentally different since a record is mutable which changes a lot of the assumptions about freshness and how long it’s kept around for. Since
IPNS “re-pinning” has been a subject of conversation lately, and I even think someone implemented a service that does it, but generally speaking, yes, only your node can do it (it’s the only one with the private key)
It’s true that only the private key holder can create new records (with the Sequence incremented), thereby invalidating older records. But since the IPNS record that is distributed is signed, doesn’t that mean that you could theoretically build a service that just observes and republishes a given IPNS key, i.e., the hash of a public key?