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.self: A new top-level domain designed to support self-hosting
- gpt5 3mo agoFeels like putting a flag on yourself that you are an easier target (security vulnerabilities, ddos, etc.)
- sikozu 3mo agoWanted to find out more but it looks to be down. Unfortunate.
- nubinetwork 3mo agoAn entire TLD full of free DDOS targets or middlemen? Yes please! /s
- functionmouse 3mo 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.
- croes 3mo agoHow about .mine?
- HumanCCF 3mo agoOur 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 3mo agoAnd you needed a gTLD for this task why?
- HumanCCF 3mo agoWe 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 3mo 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 3mo 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.
- 9dev 3mo agoThe only mistake was not opening the root namespace altogether. It’s just a money grab.
- microgpt 3mo agoThe 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.
- dgellow 3mo agoI mean, that wasn’t done by mistake
- philipallstar 3mo agoSometimes hindsight is 1/20.
- kmoser 3mo agoWhat 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 3mo ago.edu and .gov are us-specific, not sure if that is what they are referring to.
- microgpt 3mo agoDomains 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.
- AlienRobot 3mo agoI 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.
- namegulf 3mo agoThat's a popular tld for 'me' domains, like you said it's closer to .self in meaning but has better appeal However .me (https://namegulf.com/tld/cctld/me https://namegulf.com/tld/cctld/me) is a ccTLD managed by the Government of Montenegro, they set their own rules
- pezezin 3mo agoI have the opposite opinion, TLDs should have been restricted to ISO 3166 codes only, with only a few exceptions for international organizations and private networks.
- LorenDB 3mo agoLooks like we've hugged it to death.
- red_hare 3mo agoApt for self-hosting
- gorgmah 3mo agoyes and it's not even on the front page yet lol
- LorenDB 3mo agoIt's #10 on front page for me.
- HumanCCF 3mo agoIndeed 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!
- comrade1234 3mo agoGood luck getting your outgoing emails accepted by Gmail and outlook.
- HumanCCF 3mo agoWe 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.
- zrobotics 3mo agoWait, so self hosting but I don't host my own email? So you guys just want to run your own mailserver and give people custom emails? That sounds like negative utility. That would make hosting an email server on one of your domains harder than hosting it on a .com, so what benefit is this providing?
- Arrowmaster 3mo agoThis entire scheme is devoid of a working knowledge of how anything works. I'm wondering what the rug pull is going to be. Crypto or VC?
- HumanCCF 3mo agoOne of the biggest problems people have when self-hosting their own mail servers is delivery issues because the big email providers don't trust your server. The goal with the shared mail server is to create a server that is trusted by those providers and then making it accessible to users of the .self TLD so they can forward their mail to it and have confidence it will be delivered. It would act only as a relay, users would still self-host their own mailboxes. And nothing would force you to use it.
- axus 3mo agoI've started using .internal
- mkl 3mo agoThat's no use for self-hosting unless all your users are on your private network.
- warpech 3mo agoTailnet and Magic DNS make it easy to bring other people or devices to your network, including simple authentication mechanisms to know who is who
- Diti 3mo agoA VPN is literally a… (Very) Private Network.
- furyofantares 3mo agoVirtual, not Very
- Diti 3mo agoWoops! This is what sleep deprivation does. Thanks!
- mkl 3mo agoThat doesn't contradict anything I said. Private networks can be huge, e.g. in big companies, and they can still use .internal. .internal serves quite a different purpose to that proposed for .self, so the top level comment I replied to doesn't make much sense.
- whartung 3mo agoAs I understand it, if you want to use domains internally for your home ("home") network, there's some DNS support for "home.arpa"[0]. 0 - https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8375.html https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8375.html
- 9dev 3mo agoShotgun on your.self! That’s going to yield a ton of great second level sub domains :)
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- tbossanova 3mo agotreat.your.self
- BLKNSLVR 3mo agotreat.yo.self
- catfish-1234 3mo agohug.your.self
- DonHopkins 3mo agoserve.your.self 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://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x92ccvZCzlg
- fortran77 3mo agogo.----.your.self
- HumanCCF 3mo agoWe 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!
- myself248 3mo ago
- quotemstr 3mo agoICANN and its consequences have been a disaster for the internet namespace.
- jklinger410 3mo agoThis is just a fact. It's a ponzi scheme.
- jazzyjackson 3mo agounless it's promising a return on investment funded by new entrants to the scheme it's not a ponzi. Managing TLDs is just a plain old service. If you want to set people up with a different solution to planting a flag in a global namespace you're free to do so (.eth was an interesting attempt) but you are competing with one hell of a 'network effect'
- microgpt 3mo agoI 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 3mo agoOf 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 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.
- type0 3mo agoI CANN, YOU CANN, Yes We CANN!
- dorianmariecom 3mo agoit.self
- focusgroup0 3mo ago[dead]
- mkl 3mo agoSite 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 3mo agoIndeed, this response is way more than we expected. Trying to set up a web cache now.
- hosel 3mo agogofuckyour.self
- bananamogul 3mo agoHold up...why isn't .self listed here: https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db 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 - ?
- TZubiri 3mo agoDomain names are not centralized, there is no central entity that controls an approved list of kosher domains.
- zamadatix 3mo agoThis is practically useless information (and I don't mean that in the flippant "of low regard" slang sense, I mean a literal "this information becomes irrelevant once you look at what practically applying it does" 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" (it's even 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/IP protocols. That's why it talks about ICANN and why bananamogul mentioned .self has not been centrally registered with IANA yet.
- HumanCCF 3mo agoThis 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!
- plopz 3mo agoCould do something like .brave and just sidestep ICANN?
- 3mo ago
- 472936721 3mo ago[flagged]
- cherryteastain 3mo agoIn practice sadly many of these more obscure TLDs seem to be more expensive than more 'normal' ones like .org
- jdiff 3mo agoSome 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.
- iamnothere 3mo agoBetter charge an arm and a leg for it, or people will complain that it’s too cheap and argue for blocking it everywhere.
- goldenarm 3mo agoRemember 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.
- paxcoder 3mo ago>One Person, One Subdomain
- singpolyma3 3mo agoIndeed. That's the necessary
- HumanCCF 3mo agoYes, one of the key principles we follow is that all the perks we aim to provide must come with some limit to prevent abuse.
- AFF87 3mo agoWhat a memory you have unlocked. They were everywhere. I remember the urban legend that .tk domains were X% of their GDP
- foresto 3mo agoWhat 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)?
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- robertlagrant 3mo agoWill Self[0] is going to love this. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Self https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Self
- arjie 3mo agoJust use cloudflare with static hosting for things like this. Doesn’t load for me.
- HumanCCF 3mo agoWe did not expect this level of response, it should be reachable now.
- TZubiri 3mo ago>One domain per person How will you ensure this?
- stanfordkid 3mo agoI 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.
- greyface- 3mo agohttps://hccf.onmy.cloud/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/dot-self.pdf 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?
- pavel_lishin 3mo agoIt's not clear whether they're actually talking about domains or subdomains there, which is a worrying sign from a potential registrar.
- favorited 3mo agoAny domain that isn't one of the Top Level Domains is also a subdomain.
- maximilianthe1 3mo agoIsn't the actual top level domain an empty one after TLD? Looking like «.com.» with trailing dot
- akerl_ 3mo agoI mean sure, but if you started talking about google.com as a subdomain, real humans would correctly look at you funny.
- HumanCCF 3mo 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.
- pavel_lishin 3mo 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 3mo agoSeems like an idea that would be abused badly, quickly
- internetter 3mo agoa sub (level below) domain from a top level domain (.self) would presumably be pavel.self
- mattrighetti 3mo agomy.self is going to be sold for millions
- hananova 3mo agoIt 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.
- applfanboysbgon 3mo agoYou 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 3mo agoI'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.
- HumanCCF 3mo agoWe 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.
- vessenes 3mo agoHi there. I've done a bit of work on specifying human-centric identity goals for the internet over the last 10 years. May I suggest you look at Microsoft Vega? https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/vega-zero-knowledge-proofs-for-digital-identity-in-the-age-of-ai/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/vega-zero-know... (I have no affiliation). 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.
- HumanCCF 3mo agoPlease submit this to us via our contact form, we will need lots of community input! https://hccf.onmy.cloud/get-involved/ https://hccf.onmy.cloud/get-involved/
- quotemstr 3mo agoIt 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.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3mo agoSeems that my.self is already taken. Moving right along, then ...
- greenavocado 3mo agoI use netbird.io for my home lab and all my connected devices are reachable to each other without manual firewall hackery
- LelouBil 3mo agoCan someone explain how the "core features" would work ? How/Why is this linked to a TLD and not a hosting provider ?
- HumanCCF 3mo agoThe 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.
- sudonem 3mo agoWe should probably just bring back Geocities at this point.
- IgorPartola 3mo agoNeocities exists and you are welcome to it :)
- Terr_ 3mo agoSomewhat related, in case you missed it a few weeks ago, Oldavista (Altavista) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48447111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48447111
- fragmede 3mo agoI'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?
- samgranieri 3mo agoI’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.
- byte_0 3mo agomine.my.own.my.precious.self
- artyom 3mo agoThe 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 3mo agoScam comment deleted.
- pylotlight 3mo agoand yet 5 more popped up.
- HumanCCF 3mo agoDeleting them as they appear.
- prepend 3mo agoI 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.
- 28304283409234 3mo agotreat.yo.self!
- koolala 3mo agoA free tunnel would be a dream. This would be a great initiative.
- anothereng 3mo agoI think is a good goal to pursue.
- DonHopkins 3mo agoSELF: 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. To thine own self be true. —William Shakespeare https://bibliography.selflanguage.org/_static/self-power.pdf https://bibliography.selflanguage.org/_static/self-power.pdf
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- akerl_ 3mo agoWhat is the premise for being able to do "one person, one subdomain" that isn't a privacy/security nightmare?
- jerf 3mo agoI 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.
- pizzafeelsright 3mo agoimho we should be able to register ipv6 as our identity.
- zenoprax 3mo agoControlling 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.
- ronbenton 3mo agoSeems like a good way to get targeted by attackers
- spooneybarger 3mo agoI, as a human, find that website decidedly unfriendly to quickly getting information. Particularly on mobile.
- kylehotchkiss 3mo agoOh too bad will.i.am can’t spend $5,000,000 for a my.self domain :(
- Pxtl 3mo agoIf we're gonna futz around with self hosting tld stuff, can we get HTTP clients to allow self signing on dot local? It's my goddamned network stop warning me about my own servers and no I don't want to install new root certs I resent the need to do Deep Magic just to have a private NAS.
- Grimblewald 3mo agoIn this econimy? where google's full might is behind killing self-hosting? Be still, my beating heart --- there may be hope yet.
- anilgulecha 3mo agoThe "one free domain per person" isn't the interesting part really - that will be hard to police unless domain name is a function of ID proof (avoids squatting). 0) The actual intersting part of a new TLD can be growing reputation by post-facto taking away a domain without recourse in case of squatting. Instead of adversarial takedowns (which produce false positives as noted), let anyone challenge an inactive domain in the first year or two. 1) If they can figure out a mechanism for moving a domain from "assigned" -> "squatted". 2) Domain must match (or derive from) a verified identity - e.g. your domain is a hash/slug of your government ID. Makes squatting structurally impossible because you can't claim someone else's name / gov (Sign in with passkeys linked to a national ID). 3) Proof of human effort, reduced with time - require periodic renewal with proof-of-use (DNS TXt updates, through a flow hard to automate). 4) Kill speculative market - domains are non-sellable and non-transferable - always go back to the free pool, and stay there for 30 days mandatorily. Some mix of these could be the right structure for a trule high-reputation, free domain.
- ipaddr 3mo agoSounds like a bad domain for self hosting. You have to update txt records randomly and your domain can be taken for whatever reason. Whatever value you build goes away if you are inactive. You cannot transfer ownership killing any value you added.
- anilgulecha 3mo agoHence the "in the first year or two". Some more human effort to showcase proof early on, then the domain is solidified for you like iwth any other registrar. This is something like captcha/bcrypt - a single instance isn't a burden, but doing it at scale is costly. > You cannot transfer ownership killing any value you added I think this is by design. The domain should be for personal use - hence free.
- HumanCCF 3mo agoExactly this, the goal is to design a TLD according to human-centered principles. That is, we are assuming (and enforcing) that every endpoint using this domain will be some relatively small-scale environment for personal use. This is what will allow us to provide a lot of neat functionality but only at that scale.
- 2001zhaozhao 3mo agoThe $1/year numerical .xyz domain is pretty affordable already, and there are multiple providers now with free DNS services.
- mercutio2 3mo agoYup. $1/year is a great price point for avoiding squatters and proving there’s someone paying attention, truly de minimis. I’m happy with my .xyz domain for my homelab. Setting up split horizon DNS was more of a pain than I expected, but it works now over headscale.
- CurbStomper 3mo ago[dead]
- senectus1 3mo agoI've been experimenting with using "mymobilenumber.xyz" for stuff thats specific to me. the domains are cheap and easy to remember.. in this day and age mobile numbers are not super secret anyway...
- BLKNSLVR 3mo agoI'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.
- drummojg 3mo agoMy initial thought as well, so you're no outlier, unless we are.
- arrty88 3mo agoWhy not? Surely you’re putting a cdn in-front of it still.
- lionkor 3mo agoTell me you don't know when a CDN is needed without telling me you don't know when a CDN is needed
- arrty88 3mo ago> The primary purpose of the Cloudflare DNS Proxy is to act as a reverse proxy that sits between your website visitors and your origin server. When enabled, Cloudflare intercepts incoming web traffic, processes it, and shields your server from direct connections. Maybe you are not up to date on latest trends, but modern CDN purpose is to shield the origin from the public writ large.
- nilslindemann 3mo agoStates 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.
- HumanCCF 3mo agoEnabling digital sovereignty for individuals is our foundational motivating principle!
- DocTomoe 3mo agoPlease 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.
- severak_cz 3mo agoExcept that Klaus Mueller is definitely not unique name. Human names are not that unique.
- block_dagger 3mo ago> Human-Centered If this is supposed to be human-centered, why isn't it .human? I assume there will be many agents with their own ".self" domains that have very little human oversight.
- eichin 3mo agoWell, the .meow kickstarter raised €121,896 with just an assertion and a voucher system, so there's at least some community support for this kind of thing, without it needing to be a good idea :-)
- slim 3mo agotoo selfish
- danielpetrica 3mo agoSounds like a unified directory of domain with lower security that attackers can target to me. not sure the domain for self hosting is such a great idea.
- Animats 3mo agoHuh? "Will be?" It's not up yet? Are they an approved TLD registry? Their "pamphlet" is just their web site as a PDF file. Are they selling domains, web hosting, DNS service, or what? Right now, the only thing you can do is "Donate".
- shevy-java 3mo agoKind of makes sense. I remember that the local service provider in the 1990s offered free homepages for all customers. Over the years this, strangely enough, disappeared completely; still not sure why, but it was harder to get hosting. It's still possible today, even for free, but it is more of a hassl and harder to do so than what I remember in the late 1990s early 2000s. I actually think every citizen should automatically get a free homepage etc..., if they want to (should be guaranteed to be an option, never mandatory of course; and I also think it should be a human right, together with access to information. Some countries perma-ban people who "violated" something e. g. downloaded copyrighted material, that also needs to be eliminated and states that do so should be called brutal dictatorships.)
- tway235 3mo agothe .self root itself should self-host itself
- walrus01 3mo agoDo the people who are promoting this know that it costs approx. $227,000 to apply for a new gTLD with ICANN?
- edent 3mo agoThe Applicant Support Programme makes it significantly cheaper (if they qualify). See https://newgtldprogram.icann.org/en/application-rounds/round2/asp/faqs/what-assistance-does-a-qualified-supported-applicant-receive https://newgtldprogram.icann.org/en/application-rounds/round... And https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dotmeow/meow-next-round-gtld-application https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dotmeow/meow-next-round...
- rcarmo 3mo agoWe could fix a lot of this by just making sure .local (which is used in Bonjour/mDNS) could coexist sanely in mixed resolver environments _and_ could support subdomains. I built https://rcarmo.github.io/projects/mdnsbridge https://rcarmo.github.io/projects/mdnsbridge to “fix” it for my particular use case, and if it wasn’t for TLS shenanigans and the lack of subdomains, my issues largely went away.
- lightningspirit 3mo agoGood to know you're still building your own tools like back in the "old days" :)
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- sarreph 3mo ago481 upvotes on HN, and only $136 USD donated (out of $64k target) -- at the time of writing. Given the amount of traffic this project has received by being at the top of the front page for half a day, one has to wonder if a different approach to soliciting donations would have yielded them more money. Clearly, everyone here is at least interested in the idea of a .self domain, and I wager that most (even the naysayers) of the commenters would register theirs. Imagine if instead of asking for a $15–125 donation behind a CTA, they asked for $2 to "pre-register" your domain (with higher tiers for more benefits). I have a feeling they would have raised a lot more money...
- punnerud 3mo agoCan we get a super fast way to update DNS with lower cache, so dynamic IP updated through API works. This is one of the limiting factors. Cloudflare works but the cache give downtime after every IP-switch
- onel 3mo agoI actually think this is a really good concept. There is no perfect solution for what they're trying to do, but I think they have most of the things covered. Offering one free per person is nice, it can be tricky to enforce but I think doable. Regarding privacy, even right now ICANN rules require a real name and address for the domain. This project comes at the right time when because I see a lot of interest growing towards self-hosting. I am biased though, I've been working on on OS for self-hosting , fully open source, Debian based, no restrictions https://github.com/malmoos/malmo https://github.com/malmoos/malmo
- hk__2 3mo ago> it can be tricky to enforce but I think doable It’s not doable at all. There are millions of people that don’t need a domain but would be happy to be paid $5-10 by some random scammer to hand over their domain.
- onel 3mo agoThat's true. But I think it's the same case as a bad actor owning a domain for himself. They still need to do some policing so it doesn't pull down the whole TLD
- mDyJzDPmBdG 3mo agoIt redirected me to: https://drive.google.com/viewerng/viewer?embedded=true&url=http://hccf.onmy.cloud/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/dot-self.pdf https://drive.google.com/viewerng/viewer?embedded=true&url=h... Doesn't exactly inspire confidence.
- ShizuhaLabs 3mo ago[flagged]
- tepitoperrito 3mo agoThis sounds great in theory, and if you're capable of managing your own DNS servers already possible for US citizens (via locality domains). Who's gonna front the cost of resolving queries for these domains WAS my question... answered by user HumanCCF above: their sponsors and individual donars will (since they plan on operating the service as a "public good" I imagine with a strong technical team they could actually do it! I wish them the best.) I definitely can appreciate the principles they're espousing even if I'm not gonna be giving them my dollars. More people should care about making sure technology serves humans, not vice versa :) Locality domain (RFC 1480) rant: Who the heck is Multi-Paradigm Corporation and how come emailing us-dom2@i-theta.com with all of my "T"s crossed and "I"s dotted to register a domain results in silence. No response, not even a "go away". I know there's some localities where you have to have notarized authorization on city letterhead but they're mostly administered by the people behind https://www.about.us/locality-structure https://www.about.us/locality-structure https://locality-domains.pages.dev/ https://locality-domains.pages.dev/ is a good reference if you don't have WHOIS installed btw. I can't vouch for how up to date it is though since I just query the database myself.
- HlessClaudesman 3mo agoit.rubsthelotiononit.self
- mattbaconz 3mo ago[dead]
- mghackerlady 3mo agowell that sucks, I just bought a domain for this purpose. Granted, I was under extremely heavy budget constraints so perhaps I wouldn't have been able to afford one. There was a sale on .club domains, so I picked that with a funny name (beatsyouwith.club (no, nothing is hosted on it publicly yet I'm lazy))
- NoGravitas 3mo agoI very much like the idea, but governance is going to be heck.
- elzbardico 3mo agoThe problem I see with those initiatives is that there are 8 billions of us, and for most us, there are uncountable persons with the same name. And do we really want another public identity anchor given the increasingly signs of a rise on government control and authoritarism? What I dream of is an identity schema where your identity is context based, your friends can easily locate your game server, the IRS knows the stuff it legally can know about you, but it couldn't easily trace you as a taxpayer to you journalist or political blogger, even if you had a patreon or a substack and received money from supporters, the IRS can tax that money, but it can't link it to your anarchist blog. Yeah, a pipe dream, I know. But, can we really keep on living on this world without dreaming a bit?
- myshapeprotocol 3mo ago[flagged]
- myshapeprotocol 3mo ago[flagged]
- skywhopper 3mo agoI’m very confused. This is a web page with an embedded single-page PDF (!?) that gives zero details about how the project would work, be funded, or even look like. What is there to even discuss? Nothing about this seems very “human centered” to me.
- socalgal2 3mo agoreading the comments on the site itself makes me think this is one of those "oh, I think found a way to get free money from governments". It doesn't feel like it's being done by someone with genuine knowledge of domains, nor an actual mission. I sounds more like a "deal maker" figuring out a way to get rich by creating an NPO
- deafpolygon 3mo agoWe have .local don’t we?
- tomhoww 3mo ago[flagged]