Comment by HumanCCF
1 day ago
Our 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.
And you needed a gTLD for this task why?
We 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.
<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.
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You can't purchase a domain, only rent it. If anything, going through a "pay to get a temporary monopoly on some virtual object" is the very opposite of empowering people with more autonomy as the project seems to try to support.