8 ms·

Setting up a free *.city.state.us locality domain (2025)

• uneekname 6mo ago
  See also: http://nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us/locality.html http://nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us/locality.html Edit: already linked in the article! That's what I get for not reading to the end!
  • odie5533 6mo ago
    Seems like the primary use for locality domains is to explain to others how to get locality domains.
• deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
• cormorant 6mo ago
  Some similarities to *.<lastname>.name -- one of which is that the Public Suffix List thinks you're part of a single site with others you have no control over. Another is the weird registration procedure, but this one is weirder!
  • deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  • dextercd 6mo ago
    Apparently VeriSign plans to discontinue .name: https://itp.cdn.icann.org/en/files/consensus-policies/rsep-2026013-name-request-15-04-2026-en.pdf https://itp.cdn.icann.org/en/files/consensus-policies/rsep-2...
    • cormorant 6mo ago
      > and existing third level domain names will be terminated Wow! The risks of being esoteric
• beezle 6mo ago
  I had one, registered I think in 1991, back in the uucp bang days. Had to give it up due to changes in requirements and IIRC Nustar being a real pain. Would like to get it back but no desire to jump through hoops to do so.
• TrevorFSmith 6mo ago
  Definitely keep in mind that right or wrong, these hosts are unusual as far as most commercial services are concerned and it can reveal annoying edge cases in their software.
  • thomas_viaelo 6mo ago
    [dead]
  • anticorporate 6mo ago
    True. I struggled to get signed up for my COVID vaccine back in 2021 because Walgreens wouldn't accept that my totally valid .rodeo email address could possibly exist. I still use that domain for most corporate accounts. Currently, my wireless carrier refuses to believe I exist in some of their systems (but not others) because of it. Fortunately, escalating complaints with large corporations with shitty practices is a hobby of mine.
  • cube00 6mo ago
    eBay still in 2026 can't send to subdomains. Use something like ebay@shipping.example.com and they send to ebay@example.com I had to check the server logs to find why I wasn't receiving any mail and now need a top level alias just for eBay to handle their broken mail infrastructure.
  • joshgachnang 6mo ago
    I'm constantly annoyed how much trouble I have using a .health domain (looking at you T-Mobile). I can't imagine using this many subdomains off a .us.
• thrill 6mo ago
  Aren’t there several states that have the same city name repeated within the state? I think there’d need to be a county delineator here too.
  • TallGuyShort 6mo ago
    That gets extremely complicated. My town straddles the border between 2 counties. And you can't trivially have subdomains for counties and cities at the same level, because Wyoming has a Laramie city but it's in Albany County, not the neighboring Laramie County. Did this just inspire the next "Falsehoods programmers believe about... Federalism"?
    • wat10000 6mo ago
      Virginia cities are independent, not within counties. And there's both a Fairfax City and Fairfax County. Making things even more confusing, the county seat is Fairfax City despite the city not being part of the county. The county has fairfaxcounty.gov while the city has fairfaxva.gov. There are a handful of other independent cities in the US, but the vast majority are in Virginia.
      • georgel 6mo ago
        St. Louis is like this as well.
    • mikey_p 6mo ago
      This comes up with school districts too. My home county in rural Ohio had a school district administration that oversaw all the schools in the county but there are two 'exempted' school districts. One is a town that is split between two counties, so the school district would fall in two counties. Hence it is "exempted" from both and the official name is "<TOWN NAME> Exempted Village Schools". The other one if the largest town in the county, which due to it's size voted to exempt itself from the services and administration of the county government, presumably since this single school has as many students as the rest of the county combined.
  • 6mo ago
• kiddico 6mo ago
  Seeing the *.k12.oh.us in the delegated subdomains brought me back to highschool. When I was little I always wondered why the city name was before k12. Didn't know it was structured like that everywhere.
  • T3RMINATED 6mo ago
    Our school and town dropped all the .mi.us domains and they have their own domains now, why would they do that? I know it used to be k12 too.
    • xp84 6mo ago
      They nearly all did that because the average person never figured out how the DNS hierarchy worked, and many of them never even got comfortable with the idea of having more than one dot in a domain (with the exception of a “www.” prefix). So it was easier for each district to just make up a random .com or .org.
      • bombcar 6mo ago
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CsN6rbonMo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CsN6rbonMo is basically perfectly accurate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gNFFZpIDU8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gNFFZpIDU8 (we need .egg and .muffin)
  • anamexis 6mo ago
    School districts are often supersets of municipalities.
    • runjake 6mo ago
      This is the correct answer. From RFC 1386, Section 3.3.1: "Public schools are usually organized by districts which can be larger or smaller than a city or county." https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1386#page-12 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1386#page-12
• dawnerd 6mo ago
  I want to set one up now and use it to call out the city board members taking kickbacks from flock.
  • pugworthy 6mo ago
    This is probably not the kind of approach to taking out new domain names you should encourage. A lot of other causes might think this is their way to set up an "official" representation of their strongly held political beliefs, and I think you can imagine where that might go with some groups.
    • vasco 6mo ago
      "Don't use your free speech because other people might use theirs in ways you don't like"
  • prepend 6mo ago
    Why would city board members care what your domain name is?
    • dawnerd 6mo ago
      Oh they probably don't. But it might annoy them slightly if the foia docs were hosted there.
      • toast0 6mo ago
        My city already has to publicly list and host foia requests and host documents provided, if they were provided electronically. Most of the requests are for permit drawings, which are provided on paper to the local reprographics company and are not digitized, but most of the potentially annoying requests result in a pdf that's publicly available from a portal linked by the city. Not sure why it would be annoying, even in the slightest, to have it also available somewhere else.
  • davidu 6mo ago
    This is assuredly not happening.
• CalRobert 6mo ago
  Seeing the list of contacts for delegated subdomains reminds me of a time when there were a lot more local ISP's. Inreach.com for Stockton, lodinet (possibly an ISP?) for Lodi.. But the one that really shocked me was https://www.snowcrest.com/mysc/ https://www.snowcrest.com/mysc/ - which seems to still be up and running?? I wonder if the login page for webmail (ISP-provided email was a thing! And even hosting space!) still works. https://web.archive.org/web/20090909141302/http://neustar.us/register/delegated_subdomains.txt https://web.archive.org/web/20090909141302/http://neustar.us...
  • _joel 6mo ago
    And now it's getting well stress tested
    • CalRobert 6mo ago
      Maybe you should try one of the other numbers at https://www.snowcrest.com/dialup/numbers.php https://www.snowcrest.com/dialup/numbers.php - most support v.92!
  • nstory 6mo ago
    Here in the Boston area, the first commercial ISP https://www.theworld.com/ https://www.theworld.com/ appears to still be up and running, and is similarly frozen in time.
    • ssl-3 6mo ago
      What a strange time machine. The website offered to sell unlimited dialup for me, in Ohio, using a local phone number. I Googled that number, and it appears that it may belong to another (related? different?) time machine: https://www.panix.com/dialup/ https://www.panix.com/dialup/
      • toast0 6mo ago
        I worked at a tiny ISP in 2000. We had nationwide (maybe worldwide?) dialups through MegaPoP [1]; they would passthrough auth for user@dgx.net to our radius server, and charge us (IIRC) $5 for each user that successfully authenticated every month. I think we charged $10/month for local dialup only (where they called into our T1 modem bank) and $20/month for nationwide dialup... at least until our modem bank T1 failed and we couldn't get the telco to fix it so we just pushed everyone to the megapop numbers. [1] I have no idea what they're called now. There's a huge chain of acquisitions. They may have stopped serving this market, but someone still is.
• Bender 6mo ago
  Will WHOIS requests leak my address? Nope. Even though you must supply your address in the registration form, a WHOIS request for your locality domain will only show information about the registrar. Perhaps I am misunderstanding their statement but unless something recently changed this is not true. The .US TLD does not permit whois privacy services. The full legal name and address of the registrant will be shown in my experience and I could not find a registrar that would deviate from this. Are they offering delegation of sub-domains of some domains they purchased perhaps? The example they gave did not suggest this if that is so. If that is the case then whois does not really apply unless they are giving different answers in their whois for sub-domains assuming their whois would be queried. That is why I opted for .org for a small town that I operated not for official purposes as per the banner a website for in my spare time. When using a .US one can register it in the name of a company or the city can register it themselves through their own government to avoid a persons personal information being listed. Ensure auto-renew is enabled when assisting a city government as people come and go. Pay as far in advance for as many years as possible.
  • DrewADesign 6mo ago
    Maybe that’s only for registering primary domains and not subdomains?
    • Bender 6mo ago
      Maybe that’s only for registering primary domains and not subdomains? That is true and would explain my confusion on this matter if they have some list of apex domains they are dynamically creating sub-domains for. Honestly if this is the case I would avoid participating in this. This puts the control of the domain (sub-domain) in their hands for your city. Cities and states can already use sub-domains of their countries .gov domain structure which I realize is full of its own issues but that's another topic all together. Cities can also get citystate.gov in some states but I don't know how that process works. This project would likely be shut down the first time someone complains to their government about one of the sites.
      • 6mo ago
• pmcgoron 6mo ago
  > FL HOTDOG.MIAMI.FL.US. arodriguez@houseit.com I'm very confused by this entry. There isn't even a miami subdomain, just a Dade subdomain.
  • js2 6mo ago
    Delegation can happen at a dot, but does have to happen at each dot. The current referral sequence is: root-servers.net -> cctld.us -> localitymanagement.us -> miami.fl.us And it ends there with an NXDOMAIN. Unsurprisingly, a list archived in 2009[1] is no longer accurate. If I'm reading this Internet Monthly Report[2] correctly, that domain came into existence in October 1998. [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20090909141302/http://neustar.us/register/delegated_subdomains.txt https://web.archive.org/web/20090909141302/http://neustar.us... [2]: https://www.iana.org/archive/internet-monthly-reports/1998/imr-oct98.txt https://www.iana.org/archive/internet-monthly-reports/1998/i...
• aquir 6mo ago
  I wish there would be something like this in the UK but with county instead of state. E.g. swindon.wiltshire.uk or sheffield.southyorkshire.uk
  • hnlmorg 6mo ago
    Buy the domain names then and offer those services. The US state ones are just sub-domains. city.state.us isn’t a TLD.
    • aquir 6mo ago
      someone has already registered all county.uk domains in 2019 :(
  • pbhjpbhj 6mo ago
    I was hoping there would be something funny like twatt.worcs.uk or reading.berks.uk ... That aside, what would you do with such a domain? You could register x.uk with Nominet UK presumably. Just a small matter of the bill.
• giobox 6mo ago
  Remarkable, I had absolutely no idea I could do this in my state. I suspect this post is going to cause a spike in applications as folks like me discover we can have one for free.
• ltsSmitty 6mo ago
  Great instructions! Well, I'll follow up and let you know if Gainesville, FL responds!
  • deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
• kmoser 6mo ago
  > 5. Date Operational......: You can use your birth date here. Yikes, no!
  • tkzed49 6mo ago
    why not?
    • kmoser 6mo ago
      It's a vector for identity theft.
      • kstrauser 6mo ago
        Birthdays are one of the absolute worst kept secrets on the Internet. There are entire sites that blab that information to anyone who asks.
      • thesuitonym 6mo ago
        You realize your birth date is public information, right?
      • mikey_p 6mo ago
        My name, and the very fact that I exist are vectors for identity theft. But that doesn't mean I should keep those facts secret either, or that simply attempting to keep them secret will have any effect whatsoever.
        • kmoser 6mo ago
          Would you post your name, address, DOB, and SSN here? They're easily discoverable on the Internet anyway, so why would you try to keep them a secret? (This is a rhetorical question. I'm not asking you to post that info, for obvious reasons.)
          • mikey_p 6mo ago
            My name is not even remotely hard to figure out, you should be able to leverage that plus some basic info into my home address via voting records in a matter of minutes. DOB might require some sleuthing, but it's not terrible hard to find for many people (often from socials). At least in US culture, DOB isn't really considered super secret. (If it is I have an excellent source of secret info called "Wikipedia")
• ge96 6mo ago
  Wonder if there is an equivalent to Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch
  • deathanatos 6mo ago
    And here I was thinking Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu (https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ouKNv7GN16I https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ouKNv7GN16I)
    • waltwalther 6mo ago
      From Wikipedia: The name Taumata­whakatangihanga­koauau­o­tamatea­turi­pukaka­piki­maunga­horo­nuku­pokai­whenua­ki­tana­tahu translates roughly as "the summit where Tamatea, the man with the big knees, the slider, climber of mountains, the land-swallower who travelled about, played his kōauau (flute) to his loved one".
• kuanbutts 6mo ago
  Anyone know why some larger cities are not listed? For example, I am noticing that Oakland, CA is missing. This would have been a major city in 1992 when the list was created as well.
  • ceejayoz 6mo ago
    They have to want one.
  • toast0 6mo ago
    Someone would have had to have signed up to administer the domain during the time that signups were available. In 1992, I think interest would have been pretty low in general. And once the internet became widely known, something.city.state.us domains were pretty unlikable. About the only thing they have going for them is the low low price of (usually) free.
  • cmdoptesc 6mo ago
    That Neustar list is horribly outdated from 2009 and didn't list sf.ca.us and had scruz.net as the administrator for san-francisco.ca.us. I checked www.whois.us and oakland.ca.us is administered by locality-support [at] about [dot] us Try sending them an email?
    • nickswalker 6mo ago
      That indicates that approval has been rolled up into GoDaddy at this point, and you’ll have to get a notarized letter from the city for them to issue you a domain.
      • cmdoptesc 6mo ago
        Just saw your other comment here. That's a bummer. I've been lucky to have never dealt with GoDaddy.
    • vineyardmike 6mo ago
      Any idea who the current SF registrar is?
• 1970-01-01 6mo ago
  Before you jump in, and because why not, there are also city-centric TLDs for purchase, with little oversight: .nyc .boston .quebec .miami .vegas
• kraptv 6mo ago
  I have three locality domains, all with different registrars in Oregon. Two are with unique delegated locality domain registrars (think old school consultancies or ISPs that still exist) and one directly via localitymanagement.us (GoDaddy/USTLD). One of the registrars is from an out of state operator that has been dead for three years. I tracked his widow down and had a number of cordial conversations over about 18 months. I've helped his widow renew some personal domains but she's recently told me that she's going to stop paying the hosting bill of the locality registrar and it'll shut down June 1st. I've offered to take over hosting, we'll see if she is convinced. Several other locality users will likely also see their domains disappear once that happens as the USTLD registrar will require a notarized letter from the city/county of that domain to approve any "new" (new in their system) domains. Not easy for any mid or large sized city in the US. I love locality domains clearly, but the bureaucracy applied since the start has piled up over the years. I do worry that this poor Seattle ISP is going to get DDoS'ed by outsider (find an appropriate locality please if you go down this route) due to the popularity of this article, though! RIP Jon.
  • bombcar 6mo ago
    The notarized letter may be easier to get than you think - if you live in the city/county. The key is being professional, polite, and present.
    • Kneecaps07 6mo ago
      I don't understand why getting a letter notarized is being treated as some huge ordeal. Pretty much any bank or credit union has a notary on staff. It takes 5 minutes. Many lawyers and accountants are notaries. Many people here probably know someone who is a notary and they don't even realize it.
      • deleted 6mo ago
        [deleted]
  • fullstop 6mo ago
    I used to have some domains registered with "theparsec.com", and would communicate with the owner, "ML", on occasion. It was great, he was responsive and helped me out if an order didn't go through for some reason. In 2022, their TLS certificates were off -- a subdomain used by a backend redirect process was no longer valid, so I contacted "ML" and they were unresponsive. I managed to get my domains to a new register by ignoring some TLS warnings and transferring them. As of July of 2022, I have not heard from "ML" and I assume that he passed away. I don't know their identity or what became of them. All I know is that their name is/was Mark.
• foresto 6mo ago
  Having a domain under the .us TLD once seemed appealing to me for practical reasons: It's short, consistently inexpensive, and hasn't already sold the vast majority of its useful namespace to squatters. Unfortunately, it forbids WHOIS privacy services, which makes it a privacy and security hazard for personal domains. Pity, that.
  • hungryhobbit 6mo ago
    From TFA: Will WHOIS requests leak my address? Nope. Even though you must supply your address in the registration form, a WHOIS request for your locality domain will only show information about the registrar.
    • lftl 6mo ago
      Hrmm... I just tried this from my personal .us domain I've had for 23 years and it shows all my info.
    • foresto 6mo ago
      That was clearly not true for domains directly under .us when I last read their rules, roughly a year ago. I suppose it might be true for .city.state.us subdomains, but those fail my first criterion (they're not short), and are themselves a privacy hazard since they substantially narrow the search space for personal info about the domain owner. So it doesn't refute my criticism.
    • xahrepap 6mo ago
      This is definitely not true for general .us domains. I registered one a year or two ago. And assuming my normal default Whois privacy was being applied (I clicked through too fast. Wasn’t paying attention) I noticed my mistake after the spam bots started hitting me up for their web design products.
  • anonu 6mo ago
    There's almost no real privacy online in the US. When I search for my name my phone number and almost every address I've ever lived at it is publicly retrievable - on multiple sites. Even with a private WHOIS I get spam from various companies via my registrar asking to speak to me about making a website.
• xd1936 6mo ago
  Could I use Cloudflare's free nameservers instead of Amazon Lightsail?
  • lights0123 6mo ago
    Cloudflare only supports managing top level domains on the Free plan.
• morpheuskafka 6mo ago
  This list of (supposedly 7388, didn't realize there even were that many?) of them can apparently now be registered online replacing the email method in the OP: https://localitymanagement.us/registrar/domain/delegatedzone/name/list https://localitymanagement.us/registrar/domain/delegatedzone... edit -- seems like the server has been "slashdotted" by this thread, I was finally able to get an account created but can't log in. doesn't seem very well coded anyway since I was apparently able to change the password twice using the same activation link lol.
  • chickensong 6mo ago
    Amazing slow site. If it does manage to find a valid domain, it doesn't show any contact info, nor registration form. Do I need to create an account and log in to see those?
  • russellbeattie 6mo ago
    > "Slashdotted" Here's a nickel, kid. Get yourself a better computer.
    • fred_is_fred 6mo ago
      Preferably a beowulf cluster of them.
  • mfkp 6mo ago
    Now it's showing "self registration is currently disabled, please contact customer support"
  • dawnerd 6mo ago
    I tried to go through that site earlier today but they wanted a notarized letter from the city gov which, yeah, that's not going to happen.
  • morpheuskafka 6mo ago
    Seems like the company has now suspended newly created accounts and disabled signups... aren't they being paid or required on some kind of government contract to manage this system?
• jumploops 6mo ago
  Just discovered that mission.sf.ca.us[0] already redirects to Noisebridge[1] Of the "hackers" to get there before me, I'm happy it's them! [0]http://mission.sf.ca.us http://mission.sf.ca.us [1]https://www.noisebridge.net https://www.noisebridge.net
  • fragmede 6mo ago
    unfortunately, whomever set that up didn't do it right. http to mission.sf.ca.us works, but if you do https, it's broken. The cert isn't for that, and if you ignore that, then you get sent to http://netisland.net/ http://netisland.net/
    • DonHopkins 6mo ago
      Too bad it's not https://penisland.net/ https://penisland.net/
• manlymuppet 6mo ago
  This is so awesome. Can you setup wildcards? Like for example *.[name].san-fransisco.ca.us? That way I can do this once for my own name and have it setup for all future needs as well.
  • EnigmaCurry 6mo ago
    Yes. The registrar is for the root domain. You provide your own DNS. DNS can do wildcards for any root domain its delegated.
• evalu 6mo ago
  could be very powerful, how to validate
• cmdoptesc 6mo ago
  A few years back, I looked into registering a *.sf.ca.us locality domain and Sonic was the registrar back then. Now, I'm trying to recreate how I found that, and I can't. But if anyone is interested, try: hostmaster [at] 50N1C [dot] net (spell sonic correctly).
  • cogitosum 6mo ago
    whois sf.ca.us
    • cmdoptesc 6mo ago
      For some reason, I was using ICANN's lookup (lookup.icann.org) which came up empty. But yes, a simple whois from the commandline gave me the right contact. Thanks!
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 6mo ago
  At bottom, the Cincinnati, Ohio domainname URL now points to a "Site Not Found" page on Dreamhost^1 1. https://web.archive.org/web/20260513154601if_/https://nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us/locality.html https://web.archive.org/web/20260513154601if_/https://nguyen... Here is the /locality.html page https://web.archive.org/web/20141217060926if_/http://nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us/locality.html https://web.archive.org/web/20141217060926if_/http://nguyen....
  • cormorant 6mo ago
    It still (again?) loads for me.
• adamrezich 6mo ago
  Bummer, looks like most of the ones in South Dakota are assigned to noc@sd.net, so presumably they can't be used, despite being reserved.
• car 6mo ago
  In Germany it is possible to register an ENUM domain for a phone number. This provides a DNS mapping from the E164 number to DNS records, e.g. for IP phones, etc. Decentralized and under user control, no shitty silos like FaceTime, WhatsApp. ENUM stands for “Telephone Number Mapping.” It is essentially a bridge between the world of telecommunications and the Internet. With a single ENUM domain, you can combine all your contact options under your familiar phone number: https://www.denic.de/en/products/enum-domains/ https://www.denic.de/en/products/enum-domains/
  • captn3m0 6mo ago
    I saw this lets you do Fax over IP. Any other advantages or usecases?
    • car 6mo ago
      I don't know if this gets much personal use, seems real cumbersome. But this is of huge interest to carriers, since it allows them to skip the PSTN/peering cost when the callee endpoint is an IP phone. There is private ENUM for carrier use I recall, not sure what the current status is, with LTE/VoLTE, RCS etc.pp. http://dam3d3.free.fr/PFE/Pathfinder/GSMA_PathFinder_WebSiteFAQ_(v1.0).pdf http://dam3d3.free.fr/PFE/Pathfinder/GSMA_PathFinder_WebSite... Here the list of countries that have ENUM delegated for their country code. https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/inr/enum/Pages/delegations.aspx https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/inr/enum/Pages/delegations.aspx
    • DonHopkins 6mo ago
      Time travel.
  • deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  • wowczarek 6mo ago
    Sadly ENUM is dead or buried or both for many countries.
  • zajio1am 6mo ago
• jdofaz 6mo ago
  I had one for a long time but the isp that was the local registrar is long defunct now
  • NetMageSCW 6mo ago
    It is a bad idea to have any services come from your ISP that aren’t portable.
• trunkiedozer 6mo ago
  Only reason for this is for spam and shit
• jrochkind1 6mo ago
  Interesting, claim is that: MD BALTIMORE.MD.US. alby@uunet.uu.net I am guessing that uunet email address is not going to go anywhere!
• brendanml 6mo ago
  i wish this was in canada
• arionhardison 6mo ago
  I'm working on something like this... its: <city-name>.<country-iso2>.codify.city e.g.: https://los-angeles.us.codify.city https://los-angeles.us.codify.city or https://paris.fr.codify.city https://paris.fr.codify.city etc..... my goal is to replace sites from https://www.civicplus.com/ https://www.civicplus.com/ and https://www.revize.com/ https://www.revize.com/ with AI-native interfaces into city services, governments, economies etc... like a local AI-agent Economy managed by actual governing officials etc... but the admin is a separate product ATM. https://codify.nyc https://codify.nyc is the one I am going to be launching first, hopefully in a few weeks. I only have 100 or so cities on board and live right now. They have been very useful in understanding all the mechanics and nuance of delivering services at the city/local level. Your project looks interesting, let me know if you see any place we could work together.
  • embedding-shape 6mo ago
    > its: <city-name>.<country-iso2>.codify.city > https://codify.nyc https://codify.nyc Sorry for maybe misunderstanding, but isn't it supposed to be "new-york.us.codify.city" you're about to launch, given the other examples you've made? Wouldn't "codify.nyc" be the wrong way around?
    • arionhardison 6mo ago
      [flagged]
• nickswalker 6mo ago
  Unfortunately the author is correct that you’re pretty screwed if the locality is no longer delegated. I messaged GoDaddy to register one in Boston, they asked for a _notarized_ letter on the local governments letter head approving. No one within the Boston city government knew what their procedure would be, and those willing to say yes didn’t have a notary around. They ended up citing a state law indicating that no locality domains were to be used for _government_ purposes in MA as their reason to say no, when of course that has no bearing on private use… If anyone would like to band together to push city of Boston or Cambridge to start approving these, please let me know! I can revive some email chains.
  • chimeracoder 6mo ago
    > They ended up citing a state law indicating that no locality domains were to be used for _government_ purposes in MA as their reason to say no, when of course that has no bearing on private use… > If anyone would like to band together to push city of Boston or Cambridge to start approving these, please let me know! I can revive some email chains. I'm confused by this. Some have migrated away from the locality domains but some are still in use even by official/state purposes. Here's the website for the Newton, MA public schools: https://www.newton.k12.ma.us/ https://www.newton.k12.ma.us/ Belmont: https://www.belmont.k12.ma.us/ https://www.belmont.k12.ma.us/ I believe Cambridge used to use one as well but I can't confirm that.
    • nickswalker 6mo ago
      Yes, I believe the state policy says no _new_ government use of .us locality subdomains, but old uses might be disruptive to remove and may remain: https://www.mass.gov/policy-advisory/website-domain-policy https://www.mass.gov/policy-advisory/website-domain-policy It's frustrating that I can point to https://www.foxharp.boston.ma.us https://www.foxharp.boston.ma.us as evidence of private use of .boston.ma.us and still be brushed off.
  • Spooky23 6mo ago
    That law was a reaction to a Federal thing (through CISA i think) to migrate all governments to the .gov domain in the US in the name of security and branding. They were pushing it hard when DNSSEC was being babbled about by cyber people.
• hatthew 6mo ago
  I wonder how reliable this is. Will AWS lightsail continue to work indefinitely for free? What if AWS changes the system in some way? What if the person hosting my locality becomes unavailable?
  • notpushkin 6mo ago
    I suppose you can use any nameserver you like, the only problem is it’ll be a PITA to change it. (I’ve recently registered a .bt domain by filling out a PDF form, hand-signing it, scanning and sending to a Bhutan Telecom admin. Changing a nameserver would probably be a similar procedure now, and involves a one-time fee if I recall correctly.)
• KPGv2 6mo ago
  This is really cool, but scrolling through the list I find it hilarious that the seventh largest city in the USA has no locality domain but small towns in my home state that I've never even heard of have one.
• wowczarek 6mo ago
  *.eu.org, was (is) an early attempt at something similar this side of the pond, starting in the early 2000s, also free although community managed, but still surviving. Used to be a good way to get a free "proper" domain delegation rather than a shitty iframe alias soon to become ad-ridden, or banner-ridden in those days should I say. Good for 1337 IPv6 hostnames for IRC as well.
• nicktaobo 6mo ago
  [dead]
• adammdaw 6mo ago
  Wish we had this option in Canada. This would be cool as heck.
• runhelm 6mo ago
  [flagged]
• shusaku 6mo ago
  > Registration of many locality domains have been delegated to various companies Are these companies getting paid for this service?
• agensaequivocum 6mo ago
  I set up an account on www.localitymanagement.us and requested first.city.state.us and last.city.state.us. I attempted to login today and got a message that my account was suspended.
• davidu 6mo ago
  I had ulevitch.delmar.ca.us delegated to me until one day some IT dweeb just deleted it and when I complained he just said I didn't have any right to have it. So I'd caution against this path for something you actually care about.
• sleepyink 6mo ago
  Wow, this was a delightful experience. I sent off a request for two locality domains (first and last name) and got a response the next day! They were happy to do it and said it was the first personal request that employee had ever received, but there were some examples internally of requests like this going back a few years. Feels like I got a taste of what the early Internet days were like.