[amcrouch]

I brought a .ch (swiss, worked for my name) domain and have only ever had a small handful of bad sites that "validate" via checking for .com.

I would say if you're going to make it a lifetime domain then perhaps something that works in a personal and professional setting might be worth considering.

[mastazi]

I would say that .ch is not an uncommon tld at all, it is the national tld of a country and it has existed for decades. I also think that the issue you had with forms requiring .com must have been an amateur made website because I can't imagine someone who develops for a living doing that type of mistake.

[amcrouch]

I agree with the .ch comment, I was really just highlighting that sharing it with people has never been an issue.

Regarding the validation point, not so much anymore but during 2015 - 2020 you'd be surprised.

[bluedino]

I would argue for most people, anything other than a .com, .edu could be "uncommon". I have had people question .net or .org...

American perspective, I'm assuming people in Europe are used to things like the individual country domains. But it seems rare to even see .us here...

[popcalc]

Because .COM is administered by a major US player in the military industrial complex, it's the de-facto US TLD. By choosing a dotcom you're signalling your commitment to play ball with US policy. This is why Rubmaps switched to .CH around the time of FOSTA-SESTA.

[mastazi]

Yes the fact that you don't use your country's tld is a uniquely USA thing. I lived in Italy, UK, Australia, Brazil, Thailand and Indonesia, in all those places the national tld (e.g. ".it" in Italy) is the most commonly used. Even American services usually have a localised version with that tld, e.g. google.it; Some American email providers offer local tlds as well, e.g. I used to have [username]@hotmail.it

[venusenvy47]

I'm curious about the situation in the UK. They don't seem to use ".uk", but rather ".co.uk". I bought a couple ".uk" domains because they were cheaper than all the other weird ones like .club, .today, etc. I couldn't figure out why a well-known place like the UK would have deeply discounted TLD's.

[mastazi]

Many countries mainly use second level tlds, e.g. co.uk, gov.uk, co.th, com.au, .com.my, etc. because the registry of that country decided to make those available to the public, and the first level alone is not.

In some cases the first level tld subsequently became available to the public - for example in 2022 .au has become available, but the original second levels, e.g. .com.au or .gov.au remain more popular because the public is more familiar with it.

PS I just saw here that .uk also became available to the public in 2014 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.uk

[popcalc]

.CH and .LI should be the first pick if you're buying in long term. .COM etc. are Verisign Corp (essentially US Gov) names and you're screwed if there's a global conflict down the line and want to be treated neutrally. I'm not tying myself to the future Montenegrin (.ME) administration or god forbid some fly-by-night meme gTLD run out of Hong Kong that goes bankrupt in two years and defaults on their ICANN payments, getting wiped from the root zone.

[homebrewer]

> getting wiped from the root zone

It won't come to that, there's an established process for transferring gTLDs to other registries. Every registry is required to provide a full backup of their domain data to ICANN every couple of weeks or so, I don't remember the exact period. You might get hit by significantly increased renewal fees, though.