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by mrsilencedogood 565 days ago
There are a few options, though. The fact that .io got so popular shows that we are not forever chained to .com. It's just that a lot of the nuTLD options are honestly hilariously bad, most of them are just lame. My personal top picks are ".online" and ".software" with mention to ".network" but they're all WAY too long. I actually use ".cafe" for my personal stuff because it's short and cute. Obviously can't use that for your SV rocketship company though.

Would it have been so hard to sit down and pick a couple short ones - yknow, ones people might actually use?

2 comments

Unfortunately, .io is now also unsafe with the upcoming transfer away from the UK; another cautionary tale for those considering not getting a .com.

I’ve been seeding government and business forms with a .io email address for years (to counter gmail dominance), and I’m quite concerned about the situation now.

That's because it's a ccTLD, not because it's not dot-com though. The powers that be could very well decide to just promote it to be a gTLD if they wanted to not destroy stuff for no reason. Actual gTLDs aren't susceptible to the same kinds of issues.
> The powers that be could very well decide to just promote it to be a gTLD

No, they can’t do that. Every two-letter TLD is defined to be a ccTLD, and nothing else.

If they did that anyway, who would stop them? This seems like a great time to make an exception.
Literally, these are arbitrary strings following arbitrary rules. It's time to ditch ICANN and develop a parallel DNS that makes sense for today not the 90s.
Yes they can. They did it before after the Soviet Union broke up and they kept the .su TLD. It's still active. I'd argue that keeping around .io is more important than keeping .su around, seeing how many people and businesses use .io domains.
The Soviet Union ceased to exist. As long as the British Indian Ocean Territory is not breaking up or otherwise dissolving, it still is allocated a ccTLD.
But it is dissolving.
I use .network for my internal network with a proper FQDN. This allows me to get certs for internal services that validate in all browsers.