Comment by al_borland
3 months ago
Paying through the nose for a .com that is remotely memorable and easy to spell is not a great path forward for a hobbyist or someone who simply wants their own domain for email.
I know someone with a .org domain, and even they have a ton of issues with false flags on their emails due to not coming from a big email provider. They’ve been blacklisted a couple times and regularly get flagged as spam. I’m surprised he hasn’t given up after dealing with this stuff for 25 years.
These new TLDs, I thought, were supposed to open up more options for regular people to get a domain that is semi-decent. Instead they’re essentially useless. Some of the prices are also still insane, due to assumed “premium” status or domain squatters.
There has to be a better way to police this stuff.
If you live in the west/developed world, the solution for hobbyists/small projects/individuals is generally to use the a local ccTLD. I'm from Australia, I use a `.au`. Between `.au` (which they opened up recently) and `id.au` its not hard to find a memorable/useful url for about $20/year, as people/companies have been mostly keeping to the `.{org,com,net}.au` names.
I see a lot of .fr, .de, .jp (and many other European ccTLDs) used by people from those places for their hobbyists/small projects/individual purposes. The regulators and operators of these domains tend to be pretty decently reputable. They often require proof of either local residence/citizenship or local business, which keeps domains more available, at the cost of requiring you to hand over some identifying information.
Now for whatever reason, I don't really see the `.us` one in use at all, so that is potentially a big exception to the initial premise for people from the US. I presume that its due to combination of it being operated by GoDaddy and the fact the `.com` and `.org` are sort of defacto US ccTLDs..