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I work at Notion. I advise you to avoid the .so TLD - there’s a lot of institutional bias against Somalia’s TLD, like blanket blocks in many corporate firewall

by jitl 4y ago

I work at Notion. I advise you to avoid the .so TLD - there’s a lot of institutional bias against Somalia’s TLD, like blanket blocks in many corporate firewalls. This problem will be worse if you serve public user-generated content from that TLD because the chain of communication from you to SomaliNIC might have a bunch of unknown third party intermediaries where an abuse report can get lost. Today Notion is large & successful enough to be resilient to these issues, but in the 2019-2020 years the use of .so was responsible for a few long outages. To this day, we have many requests to move our service to .com. I’m always a little worried when I see other startups using this TLD.

spaceman_2020 4y ago
In general, I would advise against using any non .com TLD. Some percentage of your users will automatically type in the .com domain. Some of these might get confused and not come back. Why lose any of these "free" users at all?
soheil 4y ago
I like the .so TLD. If enough people keep using it I don't see how that would still make people nervous. It's a nice sounding TLD and if people have a problem with Somalia they shouldn't take it out on an innocent suffix.
- shagie 4y ago
  The question is "what control can the government of Somalia have on names that are registered under its TLD?" Can it seize the name? In 2010, it was regulated by the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications. In 2015 it was a different government and managed by Somali Network Information Center. In 2018 it was transferred to The National Communications Authority. Will the policies change? If the country cuts ties with all non-Somali entities will the email addresses continue to work for a time? Or will they be snapped up by scammers? Additionally, registration financially goes to the government of Somalia (see the controversies with .io TLD).
  - soheil 4y ago
    The more we fear decentralization the more powerful entities (monopolies?) like Google will become. I’m ok with a non-zero risk of my domain being pulled from under me if I know I’m furthering the cause of a free internet.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - jitl 4y ago
    The risk of miscommunication in the supply chain between your registrar and SoNIC is much greater than the risk of nation-state attack by Somalia on your TLD. The people at SoNIC are professional.
stickfigure 4y ago
I would avoid all of the two-letter domain names. I suffered 8 hours of excruciating downtime back in 2012 when the .st nic went down: https://github.com/stickfigure/blog/wiki/Beware-cutesy-two-letter-TLDs-for-your-domain-name https://github.com/stickfigure/blog/wiki/Beware-cutesy-two-l... I learned my lesson, I'll take the .com every time, even if I have to get creative with the name.
- codetrotter 4y ago
  > I would avoid all of the two-letter domain names Here in Europe all of the national TLDs for countries I can think of off the top of my head are two letter TLDs, and will be regarded as trustworthy in their respective countries. .no .se .dk .fi .fr .it .de .ch .at .pl .es .sk and so on and so forth
  - fsckboy 4y ago
    I certainly trust those and globally, cuz "in their respective countries" is not a high enough bar
    - ransom1538 4y ago
      There is always therelateteam.com
  - InCityDreams 4y ago
    Gov.uk - love it. .co.uk - always smelled of cheap, second hand, gaudy.
  - eftychis 4y ago
    ccTLDs are two letter correct. Avoiding two letter TLDs is non-practical. If you focus on the local market just take your country's TLD.
- echelon 4y ago
  .ai and .io are hot commodities, though, and I've never once had problems with either. Looking at the ample existential evidence, both startups and VCs love these two TLDs.
pavon 4y ago
What is the secondary meaning that causes people to choose the .so domain? I get .tv, .ai and finishing the spelling of a word using a ccTLD, but I never understood why people where using so (other than local businesses). Whenever I see them my general impression is one of (a) I'm not hip enough to get this reference, mixed with (b) that company was so desperate to find a good domain name they resorted to registering an obscure TLD in a war-torn third world country.
- CoffeeOnWrite 4y ago
  I’m curious the answer to this too. I always think of .so shared object files, which is a cool nerdy association.. but that can’t be it right?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- selcuka 4y ago
  It looks like there is no special meaning, at least not for Notion [1]: > We chose .so when we were starting out (lots of other companies named Notion, and .so was available). [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/Notion/comments/f6x9mk/why_the_so_domain/fi8l82f/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Notion/comments/f6x9mk/why_the_so_d...
- jitl 4y ago
  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
teaearlgraycold 4y ago
Why does Notion use .so? It looks and sounds unprofessional to me.
- kylecordes 4y ago
  It was probably the first TLD they found where their company name was available.
j45 4y ago
Thanks for the insight. I often wonder if this might be why why certain corp environments seem to log me out of notion a few times a month. Also wish Notion was a first class offline first software so it wouldn’t leave me in the lurch so often.

by jitl 4y ago

spaceman_2020 4y ago

In general, I would advise against using any non .com TLD. Some percentage of your users will automatically type in the .com domain. Some of these might get confused and not come back. Why lose any of these "free" users at all?

soheil 4y ago

I like the .so TLD. If enough people keep using it I don't see how that would still make people nervous. It's a nice sounding TLD and if people have a problem with Somalia they shouldn't take it out on an innocent suffix.

shagie 4y ago
The question is "what control can the government of Somalia have on names that are registered under its TLD?" Can it seize the name? In 2010, it was regulated by the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications. In 2015 it was a different government and managed by Somali Network Information Center. In 2018 it was transferred to The National Communications Authority. Will the policies change? If the country cuts ties with all non-Somali entities will the email addresses continue to work for a time? Or will they be snapped up by scammers? Additionally, registration financially goes to the government of Somalia (see the controversies with .io TLD).
- soheil 4y ago
  The more we fear decentralization the more powerful entities (monopolies?) like Google will become. I’m ok with a non-zero risk of my domain being pulled from under me if I know I’m furthering the cause of a free internet.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jitl 4y ago
  The risk of miscommunication in the supply chain between your registrar and SoNIC is much greater than the risk of nation-state attack by Somalia on your TLD. The people at SoNIC are professional.

stickfigure 4y ago

I would avoid all of the two-letter domain names. I suffered 8 hours of excruciating downtime back in 2012 when the .st nic went down: https://github.com/stickfigure/blog/wiki/Beware-cutesy-two-letter-TLDs-for-your-domain-name https://github.com/stickfigure/blog/wiki/Beware-cutesy-two-l... I learned my lesson, I'll take the .com every time, even if I have to get creative with the name.

codetrotter 4y ago
> I would avoid all of the two-letter domain names Here in Europe all of the national TLDs for countries I can think of off the top of my head are two letter TLDs, and will be regarded as trustworthy in their respective countries. .no .se .dk .fi .fr .it .de .ch .at .pl .es .sk and so on and so forth
- fsckboy 4y ago
  I certainly trust those and globally, cuz "in their respective countries" is not a high enough bar
  - ransom1538 4y ago
    There is always therelateteam.com
- InCityDreams 4y ago
  Gov.uk - love it. .co.uk - always smelled of cheap, second hand, gaudy.
- eftychis 4y ago
  ccTLDs are two letter correct. Avoiding two letter TLDs is non-practical. If you focus on the local market just take your country's TLD.
echelon 4y ago
.ai and .io are hot commodities, though, and I've never once had problems with either. Looking at the ample existential evidence, both startups and VCs love these two TLDs.

pavon 4y ago

What is the secondary meaning that causes people to choose the .so domain? I get .tv, .ai and finishing the spelling of a word using a ccTLD, but I never understood why people where using so (other than local businesses). Whenever I see them my general impression is one of (a) I'm not hip enough to get this reference, mixed with (b) that company was so desperate to find a good domain name they resorted to registering an obscure TLD in a war-torn third world country.

CoffeeOnWrite 4y ago
I’m curious the answer to this too. I always think of .so shared object files, which is a cool nerdy association.. but that can’t be it right?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
selcuka 4y ago
It looks like there is no special meaning, at least not for Notion [1]: > We chose .so when we were starting out (lots of other companies named Notion, and .so was available). [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/Notion/comments/f6x9mk/why_the_so_domain/fi8l82f/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Notion/comments/f6x9mk/why_the_so_d...
jitl 4y ago
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

teaearlgraycold 4y ago

Why does Notion use .so? It looks and sounds unprofessional to me.

kylecordes 4y ago
It was probably the first TLD they found where their company name was available.

j45 4y ago

Thanks for the insight. I often wonder if this might be why why certain corp environments seem to log me out of notion a few times a month. Also wish Notion was a first class offline first software so it wouldn’t leave me in the lurch so often.