Rendered at 00:08:01 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
goldenarm 3 hours ago [-]
Remember when the .tk TLD became free 20 years ago ? Every hobbyist took one, then scammers followed, then Facebook and antiviruses started blocking it.
I remember publishing a website for a class on my .tk domain, the teacher couldn't open it and I almost got a failing grade because of it.
AFF87 2 hours ago [-]
What a memory you have unlocked. They were everywhere. I remember the urban legend that .tk domains were X% of their GDP
captn3m0 2 hours ago [-]
10% apparently for .tk. I also remember .tv windfall, which is 8-9% of their GDP.
artursapek 36 minutes ago [-]
The .ai TLD is some tiny island with a few thousand people
gerdesj 19 minutes ago [-]
.io is (British) Indian Ocean (Territory).
tyre 1 hours ago [-]
And the .sy boom until startups got enough heat for, you know, funding the Assad regime.
RobotToaster 1 hours ago [-]
Apparently nobody cares that .af is now funding the Taliban
yieldcrv 50 minutes ago [-]
The terms of using that tld say it must comply with Sharia law
pretty strict and apparently the Minister of that agency doesnt care that .af is a domain hack for “as fuck” in the west
Not enough allowance to fund a .com domain, had to use freenom / tk + cloudflare for my first years of self hosting
cj 2 hours ago [-]
Double unlock.
In the mid 2000’s, I moderated a domain name discussion forum in exchange for free hosting. “X forum posts per month = x gb of bandwidth”
My goal was to post enough for them to give me WHM access so I could try to resell it.
Those were the days.
dinkleberg 2 hours ago [-]
Those were the days indeed. A big part for me is probably because I was a teen at the time with little responsibility, but getting to be a part of the wild west days of the internet was a magical experience.
cj 1 hours ago [-]
Magical indeed!
I once mailed $70 cash (multiple months of allowance) to someone to code a MVP of something I wanted to build.
They ripped me off and disappeared.
And… that’s when I decided I needed to learn to code!
s-skl 16 minutes ago [-]
Somewhere out there is a developer telling this exact same story. ‘I once agreed to build an MVP for a kid who promised to mail me cash. Never showed up. And THAT’S when I decided to get a real job.’
cj 13 minutes ago [-]
Except I mailed the cash in advance! It’s okay, it was probably another 14 year old.
My parents were not happy when I told them I sent cash to a stranger. I remember having to do it in secret because they were very not okay with the idea that you can meet strangers online. Hah.
tamimio 2 hours ago [-]
tk and cc, the domains i used to use for php reverse shell haha, bring back memories!
paxcoder 3 hours ago [-]
>One Person, One Subdomain
singpolyma3 1 hours ago [-]
Indeed. That's the necessary
HumanCCF 1 hours ago [-]
Yes, one of the key principles we follow is that all the perks we aim to provide must come with some limit to prevent abuse.
In brief, I think they aim to solve the most important needs for online identity-gated services in a maximally private way.
For instance, I'd like to see .self offer the following: a single domain to any person in the world with identity blinded. I can imagine two 'tranches': say xxx.v.self for 'verified' and xxx.u.self for 'unverified'.
Both would use a Zero Knowledge proof to confirm they had not already registered a domain; verified would register with you guys or a data broker some PII in case it was needed for verification / checks / etc, while unverified would maintain the promise of one domain = one person, but not allow the TLD or registrars to be able to unblind which person it is.
Use cases like this would be really fantastic. And, obviously could be tested out and tried on a normal domain name while you make your pitch, and put in for the auction / however ICANN is currently managing TLD launches.
It is good that Microsoft Vega is popularizing zero-knowledge identity-based attestations. It's unfortunate that they're doing so in a relatively inflexible way.
I wish the Vega people had oriented their work around general-purpose zkVMs instead of application-specific ZK circuits. The latter is a fleeting efficiency win; the former is a permanent flexibility advantage. ZK-based privacy advocates shouldn't over-index on proof performance on today's systems when zkVM systems have been making multiple-OOM performance improvements over the past couple of years.
IOW, with Nova, the Vega people are trying to do something very clever (just as the BBS+ people are trying to do something very cleaver) that general-purpose compute wins have made unnecessary.
Something like RISC Zero will let you run arbitrary Rust code under zero knowledge in a few hundred milliseconds with little fuss. Nobody appreciates that identity verification is one special case of a vast set of useful applications enabled by widespread adoption of a ZK compute platform.
How are you going to pay for the (substantial) cost of running a TLD without registration fee revenue? Is this a loss leader for other services? Are you operating on a 100% donation model?
> No parking, squatting, or reselling
How do you plan to tell the difference between a parked/squatted domain and one in legitimate use but offering no public-facing services?
HumanCCF 3 hours ago [-]
> How are you going to pay for the (substantial) cost of running a TLD without registration fee revenue? Is this a loss leader for other services? Are you operating on a 100% donation model?
We plan on operating the domain as a public good and are actively seeking sponsors to help fund us. Think of it as a similar model to ISRG and LetsEncrypt.
> No parking, squatting, or reselling
Our rule of one person per subdomain will hopefully prevent this at scale, though it will admittedly be more difficult to examine any particular domain so closely. We may have to implement some type of heartbeat where the owner of said domain has to respond within a certain amount of time.
SahAssar 2 hours ago [-]
> Think of it as a similar model to ISRG and LetsEncrypt.
In that case it was started by an institution (mozilla) with a lot of heft in the area (mozilla's CA program is one of the most broadly used) and was backed by other orgs (google) that had a vested interest in it's success. I'd be interested to hear which potential sponsors you see in a similar situation here?
> rule of one person per subdomain
What is the plan to (without costly overhead or cost to the end user) validate who is an actual person? Even large corporations with loads of resources have problems with this without resorting to treating it as if a person equals a credit card number.
HumanCCF 2 hours ago [-]
> In that case it was started by an institution (mozilla) with a lot of heft in the area (mozilla's CA program is one of the most broadly used) and was backed by other orgs (google) that had a vested interest in it's success. I'd be interested to hear which potential sponsors you see in a similar situation here?
We are reaching out to companies who operate in the self-hosted space, academia, ISPs, registars, as well as digital rights orgs. We believe they would be aligned with this mission and ultimately benefit from such a TLD existing!
> What is the plan to (without costly overhead or cost to the end user) validate who is an actual person? Even large corporations with loads of resources have problems with this without resorting to treating it as if a person equals a credit card number.
There are a few emerging technologies we are evaluating to help with this but have not settled on one just yet. Whatever we choose, we will start small and go from there. Worst-case scenario, we start with the credit card approach and iterate. This will ultimately all be a part of the evaluation process we go through with ICANN.
SahAssar 32 minutes ago [-]
To be honest it feels like these answers boil down to "we feel it'd be nice if this existed but we have no actual answers as to how to get it done".
---
To stick with your comparison: when letsencrypt and ISRG launched they had actual answers for how to deal with the hard challenges in their space:
A) how to get included in a trust roots (crossigning with IdenTrust at first and the knowledge and expertise of how to get included in the longer term)
B) Automated domain validation in a standardized way (ACME)
C) Long term commitments of sponsorships to ensure people could trust it would stick around
---
I wish you the best of luck, but I think this might have needed to bake a bit longer before publicizing.
DonHopkins 1 hours ago [-]
You need to find a benevolent selfless soul who will sponsor you.
al_borland 3 hours ago [-]
How is one person per subdomain enforceable? How is a person uniquely identified and tracked?
I'm curious about how this works, but it doesn't look like I can find out without creating an account. I see that it says "Link your existing social accounts to prove you're not a bot." How does having social media accounts prove I'm not a bot?
Might be good to know that even in the US this approach would only work for ~50% of people, since a lot of people don't have passports. In most countries this does not work at all, since they don't issue NFC enabled ID/passports.
teraflop 14 minutes ago [-]
The "how it works" page for that website says that the ID data is "digitally signed by the issuing government". But there doesn't seem to be anything in the docs about how to get or verify that signature. So it seems like they are just asking users to trust them to do the verification.
2 hours ago [-]
AnthonyMouse 2 hours ago [-]
> How are you going to pay for the (substantial) cost of running a TLD without registration fee revenue?
Is it actually a substantial expense? The TLD itself only has to publish the nameserver records, which generally have a TTL of about a day. A DNS response is a few hundred bytes. Big DNS providers like Google and Cloudflare would make requests for every actively used domain every day, but then cache them. Smaller providers wouldn't cache as well but also wouldn't each request every domain every day. For e.g. a million personal domains, ballpark estimate is somewhere in the few TB a month of traffic. Maybe a little over personal hobby project money but definitely not outrageous for a small non-profit organization.
> How do you plan to tell the difference between a parked/squatted domain and one in legitimate use but offering no public-facing services?
This is the easy one. Squatters buy domains because they want to sell them. To sell them they have to make it publicly known to prospective buyers that the domain is available for sale. So then if anyone lists the domain for sale anywhere, you make them prove that they own it (which any actual buyer would also have to do in order to not get scammed) and when they do the domain is forfeit.
It's kind of sad that we don't do that for all domains. Domain squatters can go to hell.
greyface- 1 hours ago [-]
Much of the cost here comes from compliance with the ICANN gTLD program structure, not from running the underlying technical infrastructure (which is not limited to DNS - you also need EPP/RDAP/etc). See https://www.icann.org/en/registry-agreements for (hundred+ page) documents outlining registry responsibilities. Registries can outsource some of this to an ICANN-accredited "registry service provider", but should expect to pay upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars yearly for the privilege.
madsushi 1 hours ago [-]
It costs ~$200,000 to apply for a TLD, and there's an ongoing renewal cost in the tens of thousands of USD.
HumanCCF 1 hours ago [-]
For this application round, ICANN is running an Applicant Support Program, or ASP. The applicants seeking to apply for a TLD this round who qualify for the ASP will have a substantially reduced application fee, among other benefits. Our organization is one such org who has qualified for the ASP so we will not have to pay the full $227,000 application fee.
AnthonyMouse 1 hours ago [-]
That's definitely not a cartel then.
pavel_lishin 3 hours ago [-]
It's not clear whether they're actually talking about domains or subdomains there, which is a worrying sign from a potential registrar.
favorited 3 hours ago [-]
Any domain that isn't one of the Top Level Domains is also a subdomain.
maximilianthe1 1 hours ago [-]
Isn't the actual top level domain an empty one after TLD?
Looking like «.com.» with trailing dot
prepend 1 hours ago [-]
Is it really that expensive to run a TLD? Name servers are notoriously long running on ancient spec servers.
I’m guessing, if designed well, the registration process could run on lightweight infrastructure. Maybe $1-5k total per year, not counting time. So it’s enough for a fun hobby project.
psychoslave 2 hours ago [-]
Might be a public service? I guess many countries already had such a thing with running cost several order higher than such a thing as a TLD, operating for centuries now.
Is this just an idea at this point, or some kind of "you have to use our DNS to resolve .self domains" scheme - ?
HumanCCF 3 hours ago [-]
This is an idea at this point, the next round of gTLD applications is currently open and we are in the process of applying and we are trying to garner support!
.zip was especially egregious. No one should have allowed that to happen.
Sophira 3 minutes ago [-]
There are three TLDs I block on my computer completely, and all of them are file extensions - .zip, .md, and .mov.
(Yes, the domain "readme.md" exists. Fortunately, whoever owns it is not using their power for evil and does not have any webserver there... but I'm not risking it.)
plopz 3 hours ago [-]
Could do something like .brave and just sidestep ICANN?
jazzyjackson 3 hours ago [-]
With your hosts file or running a DNS on localist you can do whatever you want
skyyler 3 hours ago [-]
there's a project for getting retro computers connected to an "internet" with 90s/00s services available, and they use .retro on that. it's pretty cute.
jrnichols 2 hours ago [-]
This is the first I've heard of this and search results have been fruitless. Where can I find more info on this?
DonHopkins 1 hours ago [-]
Oh great, an entire .brave TLD shilling a BAT shitcoin crazy crypto scam. Don't we already have enough of those?
paul7986 3 hours ago [-]
So this is my iCloud on the web for AI agents to pay me for access to my content (Cloudflare allows the bots in upon paying) :-)
Cloudflare offers this now (their Pay to Crawl service) but its not geared towards every human getting paid for their content. As of today Facebook and other social media platforms profit from our content....not us!
TZubiri 3 hours ago [-]
Domain names are not centralized, there is no central entity that controls an approved list of kosher domains.
zamadatix 1 hours ago [-]
This is practically useless information. I don't mean that in the "nearly useless" slang sense, I mean a literal "this information becomes irrelevant once you look at practically applying it" sense. E.g.:
- Centralized authorities for IP & DNS assignment? You (+anyone else you can convince) can just ignore that and it'll work in your bubble anyways!
- No centralized authorities for IP & DNS assignment? You (+anyone else you can convince) can just ignore that and it'll work in your bubble anyways!
My above pedantry aside, the article is explicitly about "The Internet" (still using the capital "I" oft forgotten about these days). I.e. the worldwide bubble which has centrally controlled assignment via ICANN/IANA, separate from other systems using the DNS or IP protocols. That's why it talks about ICANN and why bananamogul mentioned .self has not been centrally registered with IANA yet.
jerf 33 minutes ago [-]
I don't understand the naming scheme, or the apparent lack of it. I half expected it to be some sort of UUID which would at least makes sense. At one per person for 7 billion people that's a little under 33 bits. Make it a nice round 40 for a bit of future proofing (the scheme doesn't need to live forever) and to make a bit of space internally and that's 5 words from a 256-word list. That would seem to make a lot more sense then first-come, first-serve on something as easy to abuse as .self.
However, perhaps more relevantly, it isn't clear why this needs a TLD and all the hassle associated with a tld when it could just as easily be attached to any convenient domain name lying around that you have access to, such as, oh, say, onmy.cloud.
Then again I have this objection to almost all TLDs. But I'm not sure I'm wrong.
At the very least if you want to show ICANN that you mean business I would strongly suggest just doing it on onmy.cloud, and tell people that if you get the .self you'll transparently migrate their onmy.cloud domain on to .self when you get it. Nothing says "I can do this" like actually doing it.
mkl 4 hours ago [-]
Site errored out and gave me three different error messages as I reloaded. I guess it's self-hosted on something underpowered, and dynamic where static would do the job?
HumanCCF 3 hours ago [-]
Indeed, this response is way more than we expected. Trying to set up a web cache now.
samgranieri 2 hours ago [-]
I’m just using .home.arpa for my self hosted stuff. Free, just have to deal with TLS root cert trust, but once that’s down; you’re golden.
ahoka 1 hours ago [-]
.internal works fine now.
9dev 4 hours ago [-]
Shotgun on your.self! That’s going to yield a ton of great second level sub domains :)
HumanCCF 3 hours ago [-]
We are probably going to reserve some of the more obvious ones for specific purposes, e.g. my.self automatically pointing to a homepage on your local network. As we go through the gTLD evaluation process we will be keen to solicit feedback from the community on more specifics!
OJFord 49 minutes ago [-]
And the slang and typos? (ur.self, mi.self, his.self, there.self, ther.self, theyre.self, they.self, ...)
I don't fully understand how this works... who regulates and defines what is "self-hosted" or "ethical technology"... I feel you can't really solve the distributed consensus and governance problem by just introducing a new domain suffix.
sudonem 2 hours ago [-]
We should probably just bring back Geocities at this point.
IgorPartola 2 hours ago [-]
Neocities exists and you are welcome to it :)
sudonem 2 hours ago [-]
TIL. Nice.
Terr_ 1 hours ago [-]
Somewhat related, in case you missed it a few weeks ago, Oldavista (Altavista)
What is the premise for being able to do "one person, one subdomain" that isn't a privacy/security nightmare?
foresto 3 hours ago [-]
What is the expected price range for registration and renewal under this TLD?
Will there be any assurance that renewal prices will remain fairly stable, rather than being significantly raised after customers grow attached to their domains (a practice that seems to be common with new gTLDs)?
prepend 1 hours ago [-]
I tried to leave a comment and it errored out and said “please leave a valid email.” I tried 6 different addresses at prepend.com.
It’s weird when sites have invalid email checks.
artyom 2 hours ago [-]
The reason why this won't work is right there, in the original link itself.
They're allowing comments and obviously the first thing there is a scam.
No way any goodwill on the Internet is going to prosper. Not anymore.
HumanCCF 26 minutes ago [-]
Scam comment deleted.
hananova 3 hours ago [-]
It simply cannot be both free and free choice of domain.
If it has both, it will be squatted to uselessness, and blocked everywhere because of phishing scams everywhere.
You can either make the domains cost money, which seems counter to the entire point, or disallow choosing the domain, instead handing out free what3words style names.
HumanCCF 2 hours ago [-]
We have considered this, all of these things will be examined during the evaluation process of the application with ICANN before any approval to operate the TLD is granted. We could also police our domain and revoke users who use it for abuse but that may be too costly. But you are right that fundamentally we must protect the reputation of the TLD at all costs and that will require imposing certain limits on its use.
applfanboysbgon 2 hours ago [-]
You should read their proposal. Specifically, the first "core feature": one person, one domain. If you want to squat on a domain, go for it -- it's yours, and that's the only domain you're getting.
I suppose this will be done by ID verification, which is a complete and total non-starter for me, but they do have a vision of some kind.
hananova 2 hours ago [-]
I've read it, I don't believe it will be effective, even with actual physical ID verification. Scammers can get more IDs, for example by way of scamming.
LorenDB 4 hours ago [-]
Looks like we've hugged it to death.
HumanCCF 3 hours ago [-]
Indeed that appears to be so O_O. Our site is of course self-hosted, this is quite the response. Will have to troubleshoot what the bottleneck is!
red_hare 4 hours ago [-]
Apt for self-hosting
gorgmah 4 hours ago [-]
yes and it's not even on the front page yet lol
LorenDB 4 hours ago [-]
It's #10 on front page for me.
iamnothere 3 hours ago [-]
Better charge an arm and a leg for it, or people will complain that it’s too cheap and argue for blocking it everywhere.
ronbenton 32 minutes ago [-]
Seems like a good way to get targeted by attackers
1 hours ago [-]
kylehotchkiss 13 minutes ago [-]
Oh too bad will.i.am can’t spend $5,000,000 for a my.self domain :(
functionmouse 4 hours ago [-]
.me is cooler, but...
That all the cool 2-letter TLDs are designated as country codes was an extraordinary mistake that will have unpredictable and devastating consequences long into the future.
HumanCCF 4 hours ago [-]
Our goal is for .self to be more than just another TLD string, we want to specifically empower the self-hosting use case with local clients that integrate directly with the TLD and operate shared services like mail servers as a public good. We want to dramatically simplify the effort it takes to set up a domain for homelabs and offer free services that are directly tied to the domain like email.
quotemstr 4 hours ago [-]
And you needed a gTLD for this task why?
HumanCCF 3 hours ago [-]
We don't necessarily, however there are many benefits for doing so. We could simply purchase a domain and then build our initiative beneath it but then everything we do would be beneath that domain, meaning there would be two dots in what is our effective TLD. That would also mean we are a bit beholden to whichever TLD we are beneath and also whichever registrar we purchased our domain from. With the services we hope to offer around things like TLS certs and emails, it just makes more sense for use to own the whole thing from the root.
quotemstr 3 hours ago [-]
<something>.duckdns.org. works fine, and being "beholden" to ICANN is no worse than being a client of one of the big traditional gTLDs. If you want "one person, one name", well, .name is there for that.
It's a commons-pollution problem. Are we going to have to start thinking of every word with a dot in the middle as a potential name? IMHO, a new gTLD is justifiable only when there's some concrete differentiator attached to it, e.g. .local indicating mDNS, or .it indicating "Italy"
What value is there in "horse.horse" being something you can resolve with DNS? What value does <something>.self give me, as a reader, that <something>.name or <something>.me or any of the other zillion variations on the same idea doesn't?
If anything, it creates confusion! "Oh, I met Bob McBobFace. Is he mcbobface.me? mcbobface.name? mcbobface.local?".
I have no objection to providing people with free subdomains under whatever assignment scheme you guys are using, but wouldn't <something>.net have worked too, and been a lot cheaper?
I guess I just don't get the value to the public of increasing the set of dotted word suffixes that indicate that a word is a a cognizable DNS object.
HumanCCF 3 hours ago [-]
> It's a commons-pollution problem. Are we going to have to start thinking of every word with a dot in the middle as a potential name? IMHO, a new gTLD is justifiable only when there's some concrete differentiator attached to it, e.g. .local indicating mDNS, or .it indicating "Italy"
So the new gTLD round is open right now, we're getting more TLDs whether we like it or not. Our goal is to make one that has features built-in which cater to the self-hosting use case. So that is our key differentiator, that every endpoint leveraging our TLD should be someone's small-scale homelab setup.
> I have no objection to providing people with free subdomains under whatever assignment scheme you guys are using, but wouldn't <something>.net have worked too, and been a lot cheaper?
Technically yes it could work, but given the suite of features we'd like to build into our TLD, it would make things more difficult if we didn't own it. We would be dependent on external parties for our root domain, the root of trust for TLS certificates, all users' subdomains would have an extra dot etc.
akerl_ 36 minutes ago [-]
It just feels a bit like you've decided to solve the hardest possible side quest first.
Everything else on your roadmap could have been built and shipped in the universe that exists, and then if down the road it's working, you could have aimed for your own TLD.
Instead you're putting the TLD first and any of the actual functionality that end users might want afterwards.
HumanCCF 20 minutes ago [-]
That is a fair criticism, however I would say that the reason we are going for the TLD now is because now is the only time we can do it. The last round of TLD applications was in 2012, so if we don't apply now, it could be a veeery long time before the opportunity comes around again. We are a new org and our goal is to build functionality in parallel with the ICANN application which will likely take years to resolve.
akerl_ 17 minutes ago [-]
Are you working on the not-TLD parts in parallel? If you don't get the TLD, do you plan to launch on a more traditional domain?
The marketing stuff makes it look like the TLD is your main focus.
9dev 4 hours ago [-]
The only mistake was not opening the root namespace altogether. It’s just a money grab.
microgpt 4 hours ago [-]
The only mistake was not putting all US domains under .us, now the US has an an exorbitant privilege to print and enforce rules on new TLDs.
kmoser 3 hours ago [-]
What do you mean by "US domains?" Domains registered by US citizens? Hosted in the US (in which case does that include territories)? Regardless of the definition, I don't see an easy way to do this, nor a reason to, since domains can change hands (and hosts) across countries.
NewJazz 2 hours ago [-]
.edu and .gov are us-specific, not sure if that is what they are referring to.
microgpt 21 minutes ago [-]
Domains that fall under the jurisdiction of the US? The domains themselves not the websites they point to? Everything under .games is controlled by the US government, the German government gets .games.de instead. To be fair it should be .games.us and .games.de (or .spiele.de)
Even gTLDs using other languages, like .kaufen, are under US jurisdiction. A German website selling to German customers using a .kaufen domain is forced to abide by US law as well as German law or loses the domain. Using a .de domain they would only have to abide by German law. That's unfair that the US government gets to stick its grubby fingers into every TLD that isn't a country code.
dgellow 3 hours ago [-]
I mean, that wasn’t done by mistake
philipallstar 3 hours ago [-]
Sometimes hindsight is 1/20.
namegulf 2 hours ago [-]
That's a popular tld for 'me' domains, like you said it's closer to .self in meaning but has better appeal
I think letting anyone make any TLD is a bigger mistake.
.zip
.pdf
.mp3
I'd like to thank Caribbean island of Anguilla for having a ccTLD that helps identify which websites aren't worth your time in one quick look.
croes 3 hours ago [-]
How about .mine?
LelouBil 2 hours ago [-]
Can someone explain how the "core features" would work ?
How/Why is this linked to a TLD and not a hosting provider ?
HumanCCF 1 hours ago [-]
The point is that you are your own hosting provider! We are trying to cater to self-hosters so our goal is to make it as easy as possible for someone with their own homelab to get a domain and have it pointed at the services they want to host.
koolala 1 hours ago [-]
A free tunnel would be a dream. This would be a great initiative.
pavel_lishin 3 hours ago [-]
> One Person, One Subdomain
> - Everyone entitled to a subdomain at no cost
One subdomain, or one subdomain? Would I be entitled to something like "pavel.hosts.self"?
Hugsbox 2 hours ago [-]
Seems like an idea that would be abused badly, quickly
In practice sadly many of these more obscure TLDs seem to be more expensive than more 'normal' ones like .org
jdiff 3 hours ago [-]
Some of them, the more corporate or tech-focused ones like .ai or .inc or .tech or .llc. Very many of them are comparable within a dollar of .org.
anothereng 1 hours ago [-]
I think is a good goal to pursue.
gpt5 3 hours ago [-]
Feels like putting a flag on yourself that you are an easier target (security vulnerabilities, ddos, etc.)
PaulDavisThe1st 2 hours ago [-]
Seems that my.self is already taken. Moving right along, then ...
arjie 3 hours ago [-]
Just use cloudflare with static hosting for things like this. Doesn’t load for me.
HumanCCF 3 hours ago [-]
We did not expect this level of response, it should be reachable now.
sikozu 4 hours ago [-]
Wanted to find out more but it looks to be down. Unfortunate.
DonHopkins 1 hours ago [-]
SELF: The Power of Simplicity
DAVID UNGAR (ungar@self.stanford.edu)
Computer Systems Laboratory, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305
RANDALL B. SMITH† (rsmith@parc.xerox.com)
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Palo Alto, California 94304
Abstract. SELF is an object-oriented language for exploratory programming based on a small
number of simple and concrete ideas: prototypes, slots, and behavior. Prototypes combine inheritance
and instantiation to provide a framework that is simpler and more flexible than most object-oriented
languages. Slots unite variables and procedures into a single construct. This permits the inheritance
hierarchy to take over the function of lexical scoping in conventional languages. Finally, because
SELF does not distinguish state from behavior, it narrows the gaps between ordinary objects,
procedures, and closures. SELF’s simplicity and expressiveness offer new insights into objectoriented computation.
I've been looking to get into the TLD game. It's gonna cost about $600k, and it's a coin toss as to whether or not you'll get your money back. The two I've been eyeing, is .ion and .ness. Anyone want to go in on either of those with me?
mattrighetti 3 hours ago [-]
my.self is going to be sold for millions
greenavocado 2 hours ago [-]
I use netbird.io for my home lab and all my connected devices are reachable to each other without manual firewall hackery
28304283409234 2 hours ago [-]
treat.yo.self!
3 hours ago [-]
comrade1234 4 hours ago [-]
Good luck getting your outgoing emails accepted by Gmail and outlook.
HumanCCF 3 hours ago [-]
We plan to operate a shared mail server than can be used by users of the domain and we will work to ensure it is trusted by imposing usage limits. We will assume that every endpoint in our domain is someone's personal homelab, meaning small-scale use. For large mailing campaigns and newsletters there are plenty of services to choose from that enable those but for just sending personal emails, it should work.
quotemstr 4 hours ago [-]
ICANN and its consequences have been a disaster for the internet namespace.
type0 3 hours ago [-]
I CANN, YOU CANN, Yes We CANN!
jklinger410 3 hours ago [-]
This is just a fact. It's a ponzi scheme.
microgpt 3 hours ago [-]
I am disappointed that icannt.org is taken and is not an alternative root.
Edit: I've been rate limited because of this comment, apparently. Account burned - will make a new one. Dang says below it's because of flagged comments but I don't see many flagged comments in my history.
dang 3 hours ago [-]
Of course we wouldn't rate limit you, or anyone else, for an innocuous comment.
We rate limited you because of flamewar comments you posted in another thread, like this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48723651. You posted over 50 times in that thread, and many of your comments there broke the site guidelines. That's abusive. If we didn't rate limit accounts for doing that, we might as well have no guidelines or restrictions at all.
472936721 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
dgellow 3 hours ago [-]
Wtf is wrong with you
dorianmariecom 4 hours ago [-]
it.self
TZubiri 3 hours ago [-]
>One domain per person
How will you ensure this?
hosel 4 hours ago [-]
gofuckyour.self
yamillove 3 hours ago [-]
lovethy.self
teach 3 hours ago [-]
tothineown.self/be/true
3 hours ago [-]
focusgroup0 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
axus 4 hours ago [-]
I've started using .internal
whartung 3 hours ago [-]
As I understand it, if you want to use domains internally for your home ("home") network, there's some DNS support for "home.arpa"[0].
I've been using .lan, referenced in rfc6762[1] as a good alternative to the multicast .local
> We do not recommend use of unregistered top-level
domains at all, but should network operators decide to do this, the
following top-level domains have been used on private internal
networks without the problems caused by trying to reuse ".local." for
this purpose:
I remember publishing a website for a class on my .tk domain, the teacher couldn't open it and I almost got a failing grade because of it.
pretty strict and apparently the Minister of that agency doesnt care that .af is a domain hack for “as fuck” in the west
Not enough allowance to fund a .com domain, had to use freenom / tk + cloudflare for my first years of self hosting
In the mid 2000’s, I moderated a domain name discussion forum in exchange for free hosting. “X forum posts per month = x gb of bandwidth”
My goal was to post enough for them to give me WHM access so I could try to resell it.
Those were the days.
I once mailed $70 cash (multiple months of allowance) to someone to code a MVP of something I wanted to build.
They ripped me off and disappeared.
And… that’s when I decided I needed to learn to code!
My parents were not happy when I told them I sent cash to a stranger. I remember having to do it in secret because they were very not okay with the idea that you can meet strangers online. Hah.
In brief, I think they aim to solve the most important needs for online identity-gated services in a maximally private way.
For instance, I'd like to see .self offer the following: a single domain to any person in the world with identity blinded. I can imagine two 'tranches': say xxx.v.self for 'verified' and xxx.u.self for 'unverified'.
Both would use a Zero Knowledge proof to confirm they had not already registered a domain; verified would register with you guys or a data broker some PII in case it was needed for verification / checks / etc, while unverified would maintain the promise of one domain = one person, but not allow the TLD or registrars to be able to unblind which person it is.
Use cases like this would be really fantastic. And, obviously could be tested out and tried on a normal domain name while you make your pitch, and put in for the auction / however ICANN is currently managing TLD launches.
I wish the Vega people had oriented their work around general-purpose zkVMs instead of application-specific ZK circuits. The latter is a fleeting efficiency win; the former is a permanent flexibility advantage. ZK-based privacy advocates shouldn't over-index on proof performance on today's systems when zkVM systems have been making multiple-OOM performance improvements over the past couple of years.
IOW, with Nova, the Vega people are trying to do something very clever (just as the BBS+ people are trying to do something very cleaver) that general-purpose compute wins have made unnecessary.
Something like RISC Zero will let you run arbitrary Rust code under zero knowledge in a few hundred milliseconds with little fuss. Nobody appreciates that identity verification is one special case of a vast set of useful applications enabled by widespread adoption of a ZK compute platform.
> Everyone entitled to a subdomain at no cost
How are you going to pay for the (substantial) cost of running a TLD without registration fee revenue? Is this a loss leader for other services? Are you operating on a 100% donation model?
> No parking, squatting, or reselling
How do you plan to tell the difference between a parked/squatted domain and one in legitimate use but offering no public-facing services?
We plan on operating the domain as a public good and are actively seeking sponsors to help fund us. Think of it as a similar model to ISRG and LetsEncrypt.
> No parking, squatting, or reselling
Our rule of one person per subdomain will hopefully prevent this at scale, though it will admittedly be more difficult to examine any particular domain so closely. We may have to implement some type of heartbeat where the owner of said domain has to respond within a certain amount of time.
In that case it was started by an institution (mozilla) with a lot of heft in the area (mozilla's CA program is one of the most broadly used) and was backed by other orgs (google) that had a vested interest in it's success. I'd be interested to hear which potential sponsors you see in a similar situation here?
> rule of one person per subdomain
What is the plan to (without costly overhead or cost to the end user) validate who is an actual person? Even large corporations with loads of resources have problems with this without resorting to treating it as if a person equals a credit card number.
We are reaching out to companies who operate in the self-hosted space, academia, ISPs, registars, as well as digital rights orgs. We believe they would be aligned with this mission and ultimately benefit from such a TLD existing!
> What is the plan to (without costly overhead or cost to the end user) validate who is an actual person? Even large corporations with loads of resources have problems with this without resorting to treating it as if a person equals a credit card number.
There are a few emerging technologies we are evaluating to help with this but have not settled on one just yet. Whatever we choose, we will start small and go from there. Worst-case scenario, we start with the credit card approach and iterate. This will ultimately all be a part of the evaluation process we go through with ICANN.
---
To stick with your comparison: when letsencrypt and ISRG launched they had actual answers for how to deal with the hard challenges in their space:
A) how to get included in a trust roots (crossigning with IdenTrust at first and the knowledge and expertise of how to get included in the longer term)
B) Automated domain validation in a standardized way (ACME)
C) Long term commitments of sponsorships to ensure people could trust it would stick around
---
I wish you the best of luck, but I think this might have needed to bake a bit longer before publicizing.
Might be good to know that even in the US this approach would only work for ~50% of people, since a lot of people don't have passports. In most countries this does not work at all, since they don't issue NFC enabled ID/passports.
Is it actually a substantial expense? The TLD itself only has to publish the nameserver records, which generally have a TTL of about a day. A DNS response is a few hundred bytes. Big DNS providers like Google and Cloudflare would make requests for every actively used domain every day, but then cache them. Smaller providers wouldn't cache as well but also wouldn't each request every domain every day. For e.g. a million personal domains, ballpark estimate is somewhere in the few TB a month of traffic. Maybe a little over personal hobby project money but definitely not outrageous for a small non-profit organization.
> How do you plan to tell the difference between a parked/squatted domain and one in legitimate use but offering no public-facing services?
This is the easy one. Squatters buy domains because they want to sell them. To sell them they have to make it publicly known to prospective buyers that the domain is available for sale. So then if anyone lists the domain for sale anywhere, you make them prove that they own it (which any actual buyer would also have to do in order to not get scammed) and when they do the domain is forfeit.
It's kind of sad that we don't do that for all domains. Domain squatters can go to hell.
I’m guessing, if designed well, the registration process could run on lightweight infrastructure. Maybe $1-5k total per year, not counting time. So it’s enough for a fun hobby project.
https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db
Is this just an idea at this point, or some kind of "you have to use our DNS to resolve .self domains" scheme - ?
Inb4 they give away .docx
(Yes, the domain "readme.md" exists. Fortunately, whoever owns it is not using their power for evil and does not have any webserver there... but I'm not risking it.)
Cloudflare offers this now (their Pay to Crawl service) but its not geared towards every human getting paid for their content. As of today Facebook and other social media platforms profit from our content....not us!
- Centralized authorities for IP & DNS assignment? You (+anyone else you can convince) can just ignore that and it'll work in your bubble anyways!
- No centralized authorities for IP & DNS assignment? You (+anyone else you can convince) can just ignore that and it'll work in your bubble anyways!
My above pedantry aside, the article is explicitly about "The Internet" (still using the capital "I" oft forgotten about these days). I.e. the worldwide bubble which has centrally controlled assignment via ICANN/IANA, separate from other systems using the DNS or IP protocols. That's why it talks about ICANN and why bananamogul mentioned .self has not been centrally registered with IANA yet.
However, perhaps more relevantly, it isn't clear why this needs a TLD and all the hassle associated with a tld when it could just as easily be attached to any convenient domain name lying around that you have access to, such as, oh, say, onmy.cloud.
Then again I have this objection to almost all TLDs. But I'm not sure I'm wrong.
At the very least if you want to show ICANN that you mean business I would strongly suggest just doing it on onmy.cloud, and tell people that if you get the .self you'll transparently migrate their onmy.cloud domain on to .self when you get it. Nothing says "I can do this" like actually doing it.
dancing.with.my.self
reference.self
interest.self
pleasure.self
gratification.self
b.true@to.thine.own.self
touch.a.touch.a.touch.a.touch.me
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x92ccvZCzlg
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48447111
Will there be any assurance that renewal prices will remain fairly stable, rather than being significantly raised after customers grow attached to their domains (a practice that seems to be common with new gTLDs)?
It’s weird when sites have invalid email checks.
They're allowing comments and obviously the first thing there is a scam.
No way any goodwill on the Internet is going to prosper. Not anymore.
If it has both, it will be squatted to uselessness, and blocked everywhere because of phishing scams everywhere.
You can either make the domains cost money, which seems counter to the entire point, or disallow choosing the domain, instead handing out free what3words style names.
I suppose this will be done by ID verification, which is a complete and total non-starter for me, but they do have a vision of some kind.
That all the cool 2-letter TLDs are designated as country codes was an extraordinary mistake that will have unpredictable and devastating consequences long into the future.
It's a commons-pollution problem. Are we going to have to start thinking of every word with a dot in the middle as a potential name? IMHO, a new gTLD is justifiable only when there's some concrete differentiator attached to it, e.g. .local indicating mDNS, or .it indicating "Italy"
What value is there in "horse.horse" being something you can resolve with DNS? What value does <something>.self give me, as a reader, that <something>.name or <something>.me or any of the other zillion variations on the same idea doesn't?
If anything, it creates confusion! "Oh, I met Bob McBobFace. Is he mcbobface.me? mcbobface.name? mcbobface.local?".
I have no objection to providing people with free subdomains under whatever assignment scheme you guys are using, but wouldn't <something>.net have worked too, and been a lot cheaper?
I guess I just don't get the value to the public of increasing the set of dotted word suffixes that indicate that a word is a a cognizable DNS object.
So the new gTLD round is open right now, we're getting more TLDs whether we like it or not. Our goal is to make one that has features built-in which cater to the self-hosting use case. So that is our key differentiator, that every endpoint leveraging our TLD should be someone's small-scale homelab setup.
> I have no objection to providing people with free subdomains under whatever assignment scheme you guys are using, but wouldn't <something>.net have worked too, and been a lot cheaper?
Technically yes it could work, but given the suite of features we'd like to build into our TLD, it would make things more difficult if we didn't own it. We would be dependent on external parties for our root domain, the root of trust for TLS certificates, all users' subdomains would have an extra dot etc.
Everything else on your roadmap could have been built and shipped in the universe that exists, and then if down the road it's working, you could have aimed for your own TLD.
Instead you're putting the TLD first and any of the actual functionality that end users might want afterwards.
The marketing stuff makes it look like the TLD is your main focus.
Even gTLDs using other languages, like .kaufen, are under US jurisdiction. A German website selling to German customers using a .kaufen domain is forced to abide by US law as well as German law or loses the domain. Using a .de domain they would only have to abide by German law. That's unfair that the US government gets to stick its grubby fingers into every TLD that isn't a country code.
However .me (https://namegulf.com/tld/cctld/me) is a ccTLD managed by the Government of Montenegro, they set their own rules
.zip .pdf .mp3
I'd like to thank Caribbean island of Anguilla for having a ccTLD that helps identify which websites aren't worth your time in one quick look.
How/Why is this linked to a TLD and not a hosting provider ?
> - Everyone entitled to a subdomain at no cost
One subdomain, or one subdomain? Would I be entitled to something like "pavel.hosts.self"?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Self
DAVID UNGAR (ungar@self.stanford.edu)
Computer Systems Laboratory, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305 RANDALL B. SMITH† (rsmith@parc.xerox.com) Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Palo Alto, California 94304
Abstract. SELF is an object-oriented language for exploratory programming based on a small number of simple and concrete ideas: prototypes, slots, and behavior. Prototypes combine inheritance and instantiation to provide a framework that is simpler and more flexible than most object-oriented languages. Slots unite variables and procedures into a single construct. This permits the inheritance hierarchy to take over the function of lexical scoping in conventional languages. Finally, because SELF does not distinguish state from behavior, it narrows the gaps between ordinary objects, procedures, and closures. SELF’s simplicity and expressiveness offer new insights into objectoriented computation.
To thine own self be true. —William Shakespeare
https://bibliography.selflanguage.org/_static/self-power.pdf
Edit: I've been rate limited because of this comment, apparently. Account burned - will make a new one. Dang says below it's because of flagged comments but I don't see many flagged comments in my history.
We rate limited you because of flamewar comments you posted in another thread, like this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48723651. You posted over 50 times in that thread, and many of your comments there broke the site guidelines. That's abusive. If we didn't rate limit accounts for doing that, we might as well have no guidelines or restrictions at all.
How will you ensure this?
0 - https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8375.html
> We do not recommend use of unregistered top-level domains at all, but should network operators decide to do this, the following top-level domains have been used on private internal networks without the problems caused by trying to reuse ".local." for this purpose:
[1]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6762