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  • Hacker News
  • States could grant such domains when individuals register their identity, for example, "klaus-mueller-<close eyes say first word that comes to your mind>.self". It runs on a VPS, and it is well documented how to create and run a website on that. School kids are introduced to it. Would be an excellent entry point into digital sovereignty for citizens.
  • Except that Klaus Mueller is definitely not unique name. Human names are not that unique.
  • Please leave states out of this. The State™ is not your friend, and we don't need a future, even more criminal government to have access to the shutdown button of even more of our identity.

    Note that I did not single out an individual coutnry. All governments always stride towards autocracy.

  • Enabling digital sovereignty for individuals is our foundational motivating principle!
  • 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.
  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.
  • Shotgun on your.self! That’s going to yield a ton of great second level sub domains :)
    by 9dev
  • hug.your.self
  • Hosted ... all.by.my.self
  • treat.your.self
  •   write.it.your.self
      think.4.your.self
      written.by.my.self
    
    all CNAME -> claude.ai
  • go.fuck.your.self would be a pretty good one
  • 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!
  • 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?
    by mkl
  • Indeed, this response is way more than we expected. Trying to set up a web cache now.
  • Hold up...why isn't .self listed here:

    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 - ?

  • Domain names are not centralized, there is no central entity that controls an approved list of kosher domains.
  • 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!
  • 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.

    by jerf
  • imho we should be able to register ipv6 as our identity.
  • Controlling the TLD has its own benefits and drawbacks (managing email reputation, for example) but as a regular person I have more reason to trust `.cloud` than `.self` purely on the basis of proven continuity. My `.com` domain will almost certainly live as long as the internet does provided that I keep paying to renew.

    Regardless, a UUID is probably the right call. It doesn't help with memorability but it's at least more stable than an IPv4/IPv6 address and can be hard-coded. I wonder if you would get a full zone or if it's just an A/AAAA record given their broader goals of email and VPN tunneling.

  • I'm just being a negative nancy here, but I don't think I'd want to advertise that any of my sites are specifically self hosted, in that it kinda asks for ... security probing, since it's more likely than not got less than professional security surrounding it.

    Having said that gestures to the entirety of the internet

    So maybe not such a big deal.

  • Why not? Surely you’re putting a cdn in-front of it still.
  • My initial thought as well, so you're no outlier, unless we are.
  • https://hccf.onmy.cloud/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/dot-self....

    > 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?

  • 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 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.

  • It's not clear whether they're actually talking about domains or subdomains there, which is a worrying sign from a potential registrar.