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This. I've been playing around with the same concepts, and owning your own domain is critical. However, doing the domain registration dance is tricky for newbi

This. I've been playing around with the same concepts, and owning your own domain is critical. However, doing the domain registration dance is tricky for newbies. And, of course, it costs money. When presented with the choice between a Facebook Page (for free, immediate audience, etc) and a domain + website (costs money, no SEO, etc) it's very hard to persuade anyone that they should do this. Of course, we all understand that there are very good reasons for doing it the hard way, but it is still the hard way. Maybe *.small-web.com is an intermediate step that is useful.

mlatu 5y ago
because of this i have been eying the GNS (gnunet.org) project for quite some time. it's a p2p, decentralized, dns-replacement, also gnu I would love to see this adapted widely, but as always, the established standards are good enough and any advantages resulting from using gnunet are not advantageous from a profit oriented point of view, so it would first need a killerapp to take off.
chrismorgan 5y ago
> Maybe *.small-web.com is an intermediate step that is useful. I pondered this before first posting, and decided that although I’m sympathetic to the reasoning I believe it’s a grave error of judgement, and that they should force people to use their own domains. Not only does it undermine their stated goals, but it makes them as a company or foundation more likely to fail since providing a domain will lead to significant abuse of their service if they offer any free service at all, including trial periods. (Newcomers to these sorts of industries tend to be surprised at how all-pervasive and varied abuse is, even of small players.) Requiring that people provide a domain would certainly turn away some potential customers/users that would perhaps have finished the job and moved to a domain of their own later, but it would also vastly reduce the burden of abuse. And so I decided to use the word “must”, italicised, for practical reasons as well as ideological. In their first phase, they’re even targeting tech-savvy people, who are less likely to “need” *.small-web.com.

mlatu 5y ago

because of this i have been eying the GNS (gnunet.org) project for quite some time. it's a p2p, decentralized, dns-replacement, also gnu I would love to see this adapted widely, but as always, the established standards are good enough and any advantages resulting from using gnunet are not advantageous from a profit oriented point of view, so it would first need a killerapp to take off.

chrismorgan 5y ago

> Maybe *.small-web.com is an intermediate step that is useful. I pondered this before first posting, and decided that although I’m sympathetic to the reasoning I believe it’s a grave error of judgement, and that they should force people to use their own domains. Not only does it undermine their stated goals, but it makes them as a company or foundation more likely to fail since providing a domain will lead to significant abuse of their service if they offer any free service at all, including trial periods. (Newcomers to these sorts of industries tend to be surprised at how all-pervasive and varied abuse is, even of small players.) Requiring that people provide a domain would certainly turn away some potential customers/users that would perhaps have finished the job and moved to a domain of their own later, but it would also vastly reduce the burden of abuse. And so I decided to use the word “must”, italicised, for practical reasons as well as ideological. In their first phase, they’re even targeting tech-savvy people, who are less likely to “need” *.small-web.com.