.self: A new top-level domain designed to support self-hosting

https://hccf.onmy.cloud/2026/06/21/reclaiming-our-digital-selves-hccfs-vision-for-a-human-centered-top-level-domain/

by HumanCCF • 23 days ago

676 380 23 days ago

hccf.onmy.cloud

.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.

HumanCCF24• 23 days 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.

quotemstr6• 23 days ago

And you needed a gTLD for this task why?

9dev2• 23 days ago

The only mistake was not opening the root namespace altogether. It’s just a money grab.

microgpt3• 23 days ago

The 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.

croes• 23 days ago

How about .mine?

AlienRobot• 23 days ago

I 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• 23 days ago

That'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) is a ccTLD managed by the Government of Montenegro, they set their own rules

pezezin• 23 days ago

I 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.

LorenDB2• 23 days ago

Looks like we've hugged it to death.

gorgmah• 23 days ago

yes and it's not even on the front page yet lol

LorenDB2• 23 days ago

It's #10 on front page for me.

red_hare• 23 days ago

Apt for self-hosting

HumanCCF24• 23 days ago

Indeed 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• 23 days ago

Good luck getting your outgoing emails accepted by Gmail and outlook.

HumanCCF24• 23 days ago

We 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• 23 days ago

Wait, 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?

axus• 23 days ago

I've started using .internal

mkl3• 23 days ago

That's no use for self-hosting unless all your users are on your private network.

warpech• 23 days ago

Tailnet and Magic DNS make it easy to bring other people or devices to your network, including simple authentication mechanisms to know who is who

whartung• 23 days ago

As 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

mawise• 23 days ago

I've been using .lan, referenced in rfc6762[1] as a good alternative to the multicast .local

We do not recommend use of unregistered top-level domains at all, but should network operators decide to do this, the following top-level domains have been used on private internal networks without the problems caused by trying to reuse ".local." for this purpose:

      .intranet.
      .internal.
      .private.
      .corp.
      .home.
      .lan.

[1]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6762

9dev2• 23 days ago

Shotgun on your.self! That’s going to yield a ton of great second level sub domains :)

tbossanova• 23 days ago

treat.your.self

BLKNSLVR3• 23 days ago

treat.yo.self

catfish-1234• 23 days ago

hug.your.self

DonHopkins3• 23 days ago

serve.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

fortran77• 23 days ago

go.----.your.self

HumanCCF24• 23 days ago

We 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• 23 days ago

Hey now!

OJFord• 23 days ago

And the slang and typos? (ur.self, mi.self, his.self, there.self, ther.self, theyre.self, they.self, ...)

laszlokorte• 23 days ago

  write.it.your.self
  think.4.your.self
  written.by.my.self

all CNAME -> claude.ai

sneak2• 23 days ago

SNI and the Host: header ruin your joke here.

Hugsbox2• 23 days ago

go.fuck.your.self would be a pretty good one

neogodless• 23 days ago

Hosted ... all.by.my.self

quotemstr6• 23 days ago

ICANN and its consequences have been a disaster for the internet namespace.

microgpt3• 23 days ago

I 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• 23 days ago

Of 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. 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.

jklinger410• 23 days ago

This is just a fact. It's a ponzi scheme.

jazzyjackson2• 23 days ago

unless 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'

type0• 23 days ago

I CANN, YOU CANN, Yes We CANN!

sikozu• 23 days ago

Wanted to find out more but it looks to be down. Unfortunate.

dorianmariecom• 23 days ago

it.self

mkl3• 23 days ago

Site 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?

HumanCCF24• 23 days ago

Indeed, this response is way more than we expected. Trying to set up a web cache now.

hosel• 23 days ago

gofuckyour.self

yamillove• 23 days ago

lovethy.self

teach• 23 days ago

tothineown.self/be/true

bananamogul• 23 days ago

Hold up...why isn't .self listed here:

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 - ?

HumanCCF24• 23 days ago

This 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• 23 days ago

Could do something like .brave and just sidestep ICANN?

OsrsNeedsf2P• 23 days ago

TIL https://newgtldprogram.icann.org/en/application-rounds/round...

paul7986• 23 days ago

So this is my iCloud on the web for AI agents to pay me for access to my content (Cloudflare allows the bots in upon paying) :-)

Cloudflare offers this now (their Pay to Crawl service) but its not geared towards every human getting paid for their content. As of today Facebook and other social media platforms profit from our content....not us!

TZubiri2• 23 days ago

Domain names are not centralized, there is no central entity that controls an approved list of kosher domains.

zamadatix• 23 days ago

This 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.

iamnothere• 23 days ago

Better charge an arm and a leg for it, or people will complain that it’s too cheap and argue for blocking it everywhere.

cherryteastain• 23 days ago

In practice sadly many of these more obscure TLDs seem to be more expensive than more 'normal' ones like .org

jdiff• 23 days ago

Some 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.

goldenarm• 23 days ago

Remember 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• 23 days ago

One Person, One Subdomain

singpolyma3• 23 days ago

Indeed. That's the necessary

AFF87• 23 days ago

What a memory you have unlocked. They were everywhere. I remember the urban legend that .tk domains were X% of their GDP

captn3m0• 23 days ago

10% apparently for .tk. I also remember .tv windfall, which is 8-9% of their GDP.

preisschild2• 23 days ago

Core memory unlocked

Not enough allowance to fund a .com domain, had to use freenom / tk + cloudflare for my first years of self hosting

cj3• 23 days ago

Double unlock.

In the mid 2000’s, I moderated a domain name discussion forum in exchange for free hosting. “X forum posts per month = x gb of bandwidth”

My goal was to post enough for them to give me WHM access so I could try to resell it.

Those were the days.

hahahaa• 23 days ago

In my case, ignorance unlocked. I never heard of tk and I remember 36k modems so old enough.

I think reason is I went to work, slung .NET and didn't think much about computers otherwise except occasional reading some C++ books for "fun".

tamimio• 23 days ago

tk and cc, the domains i used to use for php reverse shell haha, bring back memories!

DonHopkins3• 23 days ago

At least https://tcl.tk redirects => https://www.tcl-lang.org/

Peacefulz• 23 days ago

I was hoping to see the classic doctor redirect banner when I hit that link. Still so very cool that they kept their domain active this whole time!

mghackerlady5• 22 days ago

that's the first thing I thought of when I saw .tk. I may just be too tclish, however

mort965• 23 days ago

A friend almost failed an IT class because his website didn't render at all in IE6. This was during the time of IE9. The teacher just hadn't updated their browser in a long time.

I don't get how you get to be an IT teacher without knowing the most basic troubleshooting steps to get assignments to run.

Cpoll• 23 days ago

I had a similar class where they threatened to fail us if we didn't use Dreamweaver and instead wrote our own html.

mathstuf• 23 days ago

Heh…I once was in a state-level coding event (it was a small portion of a larger competition) where half of the test was turning in code on a CD during the competition, with the written half during the event. My CD was deemed unusable for whatever reason (it had worked on XP and Fedora 6 or 7 at home) and didn't count towards my score. I still got second in the event. I declined to continue because I couldn't trust that the judges would be able judge my submission fairly and that with half of my score missing I still got second that I didn't need to prove anything else at the cost of more after-school practice hours and wrecking my perfect attendance record during my senior year to travel to nationals.

techpression• 23 days ago

It's a built-in secret part of the teaching for any job where you interact with customers, they don't upgrade and they have no troubleshooting skills.

Or just ineptitude, but I'm hoping for the former.

lovich• 23 days ago

Tenure. Or at least that was my experience with my comp sci teacher who required that we gave him printed out programs for our homework and then tossed them into the trash while making eye contact with you and gave you a grade later.

The schools admins told me he had tenure so there was nothing I could do.

Didn’t take me a whole year before I switched majors.

JimDabell• 23 days ago

During the time of Internet Explorer 9, it was surprisingly common for people to still be using Internet Explorer 6. This was often out of their control, for instance if they had intranet sites that required Internet Explorer 6, or if they were stuck on an old version of Windows because they had outdated hardware.

Later versions of Internet Explorer had compatibility mode, but it often wasn’t enough to get things working, especially if there was ActiveX involved or the security policies were restrictive.

Schools were especially prone to this due to their limited budgets among other reasons, and IT teachers weren’t normally the decision makers who could do anything about it. You shouldn’t assume that a random IT teacher had the authority to spontaneously upgrade a school computer that needs to be used for things besides that one student’s assignment.

hilariously• 23 days ago

I left community college after a week because my "computer" teacher required us to change our monitors to 640x480 and print out ever step that we completed in things like Notepad or Configuring the Desktop and then every day we'd punch it out and would add it to a three ring binder of all the things we've done.

Full Color.

paulluuk• 23 days ago

I assume this was at a highschool and not at university? My IT teacher in highschool was the chemistry teacher, because.. he knew how to use Word, I guess?

He knew we were computer nerds so didn't really care about teaching us (we knew more than him anyway). And we didn't mind that he just sat there drinking coffee and reading a book, as it meant we could just play videogames for an hour. Good times.

dosman33• 22 days ago

Those that can, do - and those that can't, teach.

Teaching is rewarding which is why people do it, but you're asking them to take less pay for what is often a harder job - convincing kids to learn something when they have dozens of other things competing for their interest. The math aligns on the side with the teacher having the knowledge you would expect in this scenario - with a fair number of teachers not as much knowledge as one would hope they would have. On the students side, if they are bright then this is a soft-skill learning opportunity - how to navigate knowing more than your superior to the benefit of you both.

mghackerlady5• 22 days ago

I'm lucky both of my schools IT teachers were actually competent, they were both technically business teachers but were good with code.

That first teacher died shortly after, she had terminal breast cancer. I miss her a lot

BrandoElFollito2• 22 days ago

OTOH this is an opportunity to learn yo add guardrails to the cide to check for browser capabilities and display a page inviting to move to new stuff

soneil• 22 days ago

This feels like a good place to reel out my favourite anecdote; community college IT (or for the natives; BTEC), 1998; our programming tutor told us to "ignore the internet" because it's a fad.

Almost 30 years, and every so often I still wonder about where that got him.

glenstein• 23 days ago

I remember that. The one thing I would add is I think the usage was much more general purpose. "Free stuff" sites were a big deal and huge source of traffic and .tk was widely shared on those. You could have a banner with ads and have the domain for free.

znpy• 23 days ago

I still have a .tk domain, paid since 2008, because it was the only one with my surname available.

Haven’t had much issues but surely if could go back and i’d pick a different tld.

victorbjorklund• 23 days ago

RIP .tk. Those were the days.

southforgeai• 22 days ago

Wow this brought back a flood of memories. I'll never forget spinning up lycos and geocity sites with .tk domains

cellu• 22 days ago

those were the days!!

lightningspirit2• 22 days ago

And then everybody left, yeah, I remember this exactly.

foresto• 23 days ago

What 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)?

gpt5• 23 days ago

Feels like putting a flag on yourself that you are an easier target (security vulnerabilities, ddos, etc.)

robertlagrant• 23 days ago

Will Self[0] is going to love this.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Self

arjie• 23 days ago

Just use cloudflare with static hosting for things like this. Doesn’t load for me.

HumanCCF24• 23 days ago

We did not expect this level of response, it should be reachable now.

TZubiri2• 23 days ago

One domain per person

How will you ensure this?

stanfordkid• 23 days ago

I 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-2• 23 days ago

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_lishin2• 23 days ago

It's not clear whether they're actually talking about domains or subdomains there, which is a worrying sign from a potential registrar.

favorited• 23 days ago

Any domain that isn't one of the Top Level Domains is also a subdomain.

HumanCCF24• 23 days 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.

al_borland• 23 days ago

How is one person per subdomain enforceable? How is a person uniquely identified and tracked?

SahAssar3• 23 days ago

Think of it as a similar model to ISRG and LetsEncrypt.

In that case it was started by an institution (mozilla) with a lot of heft in the area (mozilla's CA program is one of the most broadly used) and was backed by other orgs (google) that had a vested interest in it's success. I'd be interested to hear which potential sponsors you see in a similar situation here?

rule of one person per subdomain

What is the plan to (without costly overhead or cost to the end user) validate who is an actual person? Even large corporations with loads of resources have problems with this without resorting to treating it as if a person equals a credit card number.

Galanwe• 23 days ago

We may have to implement some type of heartbeat where the owner of said domain has to respond within a certain amount of time.

A domain squatter is in an easier position to automate that than an amateur to not forget to respond.

hk__22• 23 days ago

Our rule of one person per subdomain will hopefully prevent this at scale

No it won’t. Spammers will just pay thousands of random people in poor countries to create their domain.

AnthonyMouse3• 23 days ago

How are you going to pay for the (substantial) cost of running a TLD without registration fee revenue?

Is it actually a substantial expense? The TLD itself only has to publish the nameserver records, which generally have a TTL of about a day. A DNS response is a few hundred bytes. Big DNS providers like Google and Cloudflare would make requests for every actively used domain every day, but then cache them. Smaller providers wouldn't cache as well but also wouldn't each request every domain every day. For e.g. a million personal domains, ballpark estimate is somewhere in the few TB a month of traffic. Maybe a little over personal hobby project money but definitely not outrageous for a small non-profit organization.

How do you plan to tell the difference between a parked/squatted domain and one in legitimate use but offering no public-facing services?

This is the easy one. Squatters buy domains because they want to sell them. To sell them they have to make it publicly known to prospective buyers that the domain is available for sale. So then if anyone lists the domain for sale anywhere, you make them prove that they own it (which any actual buyer would also have to do in order to not get scammed) and when they do the domain is forfeit.

It's kind of sad that we don't do that for all domains. Domain squatters can go to hell.

madsushi• 23 days ago

It costs ~$200,000 to apply for a TLD, and there's an ongoing renewal cost in the tens of thousands of USD.

greyface-2• 23 days ago

Much of the cost here comes from compliance with the ICANN gTLD program structure, not from running the underlying technical infrastructure (which is not limited to DNS - you also need EPP/RDAP/etc). See https://www.icann.org/en/registry-agreements for (hundred+ page) documents outlining registry responsibilities. Registries can outsource some of this to an ICANN-accredited "registry service provider", but should expect to pay upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars yearly for the privilege.

miki1232114• 23 days ago

You can't do it in the general case.

Most TLDs need to allow domain transfers because projects do genuinely change ownership sometimes. If you allow transfers, you allow reselling by definition (because you can't physically determine whether cash changes hands).

This isn't like tickets, where "return to pool and let an interested party buy it" is a viable strategy. Tickets are fungible, domains are non-fungible.

psychoslave3• 23 days ago

Might be a public service? I guess many countries already had such a thing with running cost several order higher than such a thing as a TLD, operating for centuries now.

miki1232114• 23 days ago

Countries have the loop of "taxpayers pay government -> government funds service -> service benefits taxpayers." You can't do that if you offer the service to the general internet.

prepend2• 23 days ago

Is it really that expensive to run a TLD? Name servers are notoriously long running on ancient spec servers.

I’m guessing, if designed well, the registration process could run on lightweight infrastructure. Maybe $1-5k total per year, not counting time. So it’s enough for a fun hobby project.

pavel_lishin2• 23 days 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"?

Hugsbox2• 23 days ago

Seems like an idea that would be abused badly, quickly

internetter• 23 days ago

a sub (level below) domain from a top level domain (.self) would presumably be pavel.self

mattrighetti• 23 days ago

my.self is going to be sold for millions

hananova2• 23 days ago

It 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• 23 days ago

You 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.

hananova2• 23 days ago

I'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.

HumanCCF24• 23 days ago

We 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.

vessenes2• 23 days ago

Hi 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-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.

HumanCCF24• 23 days ago

Please submit this to us via our contact form, we will need lots of community input! https://hccf.onmy.cloud/get-involved/

quotemstr6• 23 days ago

It 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.

vessenes2• 23 days ago

Can you talk more about RISC Zero? Does it require a TEE of some sort? I had trouble finding a quality mid-detail spec of how it works; lots of marketing materials basically.

nl2• 23 days ago

Disagree with this.

RISC Zero is useful for crypto use-cases: Other people need to verify an exact program was run.

The identity use case is about connecting sources of trust (document issuers) with consumers of that trust ("this is a real person") in ways that don't release more than the minimum information required ("the passport office has signed that this is a real person so we can trust that").

Single purpose circuits make a lot of sense for this - there is just no need to a full ZK RISC-V VM for this use case.

PaulDavisThe1st• 23 days ago

Seems that my.self is already taken. Moving right along, then ...

greenavocado• 23 days ago

I use netbird.io for my home lab and all my connected devices are reachable to each other without manual firewall hackery

LelouBil• 23 days ago

Can someone explain how the "core features" would work ?

How/Why is this linked to a TLD and not a hosting provider ?

HumanCCF24• 23 days ago

The 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.

sudonem2• 23 days ago

We should probably just bring back Geocities at this point.

IgorPartola• 23 days ago

Neocities exists and you are welcome to it :)

sudonem2• 23 days ago

TIL. Nice.

koolala3• 23 days ago

Their free terms are kind of bad. They use CORS security feature to block you from loading content from other sites. It doesn't cost them anything to let your site link outside content so they are only doing it make the free tier bad so people upgrade.

Terr_• 23 days ago

Somewhat related, in case you missed it a few weeks ago, Oldavista (Altavista)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48447111

fragmede• 23 days ago

I'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• 23 days ago

I’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.

ahoka2• 23 days ago

.internal works fine now.

DocTomoe2• 23 days ago

Both of these are meant for operating a home/private network.

.self seems to be geared towards a 'accessible from the everyday net' kind of approach.

kaelwd• 23 days ago

I just use .home, yeah I know it's not reserved but idgaf I'm not writing .arpa.

byte_0• 23 days ago

mine.my.own.my.precious.self

artyom• 23 days ago

The 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.

HumanCCF24• 23 days ago

Scam comment deleted.

pylotlight• 23 days ago

and yet 5 more popped up.

28304283409234• 23 days ago

treat.yo.self!

koolala3• 23 days ago

A free tunnel would be a dream. This would be a great initiative.

anothereng• 23 days ago

I think is a good goal to pursue.

prepend2• 23 days ago

I 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.

DonHopkins3• 23 days ago

SELF: 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

akerl_4• 23 days ago

What is the premise for being able to do "one person, one subdomain" that isn't a privacy/security nightmare?

jerf• 23 days ago

I 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• 23 days ago

imho we should be able to register ipv6 as our identity.

zenoprax• 23 days ago

Controlling 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• 23 days ago

Seems like a good way to get targeted by attackers

kylehotchkiss• 23 days ago

Oh too bad will.i.am can’t spend $5,000,000 for a my.self domain :(

spooneybarger• 23 days ago

I, as a human, find that website decidedly unfriendly to quickly getting information. Particularly on mobile.

Pxtl• 23 days ago

If 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• 23 days ago

In this econimy? where google's full might is behind killing self-hosting? Be still, my beating heart --- there may be hope yet.

anilgulecha3• 23 days ago

The "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• 23 days ago

Sounds 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.

anilgulecha3• 23 days ago

Hence 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.

BuyMyBitcoins• 23 days ago

I dislike the term “domain squatting”. It should be called “domain scalping”.

nonethewiser• 23 days ago

Or domain ownership.

jurgenaut23• 23 days ago

I am probably missing something, but how DNS TXT updates can be made difficult to automate?

anilgulecha3• 23 days ago

We can get creative. quick ideas: Send it by printed post. pass it around people to people. an email needs to be added in with some process, and can only get one TXT update value a week.

Many ways of adding friction to obtaining the updatable value - which a human owning a domain would be happy to do, but a squatter would not want to.

qq66• 23 days ago

The much simpler way to avoid squatting is to make .com domains cost $200 a year. This will instantly end the vast majority of domain squatting on the .com TLD and if people can easily get the .com they need for their business then the other TLDs are not going to have much squatting activity.

schrodinger2• 23 days ago

I don't get it. How do you handle 10k people wanting, say, garden.com, without a free market?

zelphirkalt• 23 days ago

How does this lend itself to self-hosting then? I think few people will pay that much to self host.

oarsinsync2• 23 days ago

The much simpler way to avoid squatting is to make .com domains cost $200 a year

A monopolist hiking prices to this extent will likely see legal action against them. That's a 20x increase you're proposing.

It's also unlikely to have a material effect. .com used to cost $75 a year back in the day, and that didn't stop squatters, and high value domain transfer sales. $75 in 1990s dollars is about $150-$190 today.

_kb• 23 days ago

.id.au already has some similar requirements for associating a domain with a real world (human) identity: https://www.auda.org.au/au-domain-names/the-different-au-dom...

interloxia• 23 days ago

Also .net.au and .com.au are not available for personal use.

tepitoperrito2• 23 days ago

These ideas are gold! Thanks for sharing. I'm gonna noodle on an unholy mix of 2) and 3) since my dynamic DNS provider just asks that you login once every 30 days and a hash of a (valid) state ID or DL would be an acceptable burden I feel for issuing a domain (or subdomain even).

yearolinuxdsktp• 22 days ago

#2, name matching valid government ID excludes trans people who have not yet legally changed their name. Same reason they can’t get a Meta Verified status, even if paying. Thanks technology for keeping things accessible to everyone!</s>

BrandoElFollito2• 22 days ago

Sign in with passkeys linked to a national ID

With what?? Please understand that all countries are not like yours. In France this will happen in 2047 if all planets are aligned (they won't be)

2001zhaozhao• 23 days ago

The $1/year numerical .xyz domain is pretty affordable already, and there are multiple providers now with free DNS services.

mercutio2• 22 days ago

Yup. $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.

senectus1• 23 days ago

I'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...

BLKNSLVR3• 23 days ago

I'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• 23 days ago

My initial thought as well, so you're no outlier, unless we are.

arrty882• 23 days ago

Why not? Surely you’re putting a cdn in-front of it still.

lionkor2• 22 days ago

Tell me you don't know when a CDN is needed without telling me you don't know when a CDN is needed

nilslindemann• 23 days ago

States 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.

HumanCCF24• 23 days ago

Enabling digital sovereignty for individuals is our foundational motivating principle!

DocTomoe2• 23 days ago

Please 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• 23 days ago

Except that Klaus Mueller is definitely not unique name. Human names are not that unique.

block_dagger• 23 days 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• 23 days ago

Well, 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• 23 days ago

too selfish

danielpetrica• 23 days ago

Sounds 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• 23 days ago

Huh?

"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• 23 days ago

Kind 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• 23 days ago

the .self root itself should self-host itself

walrus01• 23 days ago

Do the people who are promoting this know that it costs approx. $227,000 to apply for a new gTLD with ICANN?

edent• 23 days ago

The Applicant Support Programme makes it significantly cheaper (if they qualify).

See https://newgtldprogram.icann.org/en/application-rounds/round...

And https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dotmeow/meow-next-round...

rcarmo• 23 days ago

We 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 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.

lightningspirit2• 22 days ago

Good to know you're still building your own tools like back in the "old days" :)

sarreph• 23 days ago

481 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• 23 days ago

Can 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

onel2• 23 days ago

I 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

hk__22• 23 days 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.

onel2• 23 days ago

That'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• 23 days ago

It redirected me to: https://drive.google.com/viewerng/viewer?embedded=true&url=h... Doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

petee• 23 days ago

On mobile this surfaced as trying to download a file called "viewer", couldn't see the url. Def weird

rockbruno• 23 days ago

Same for me on desktop.

lgcmo• 22 days ago

I opened in work desktop. I'm waiting the IT call now

tepitoperrito2• 23 days ago

This 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://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• 23 days ago

it.rubsthelotiononit.self

nubinetwork• 23 days ago

An entire TLD full of free DDOS targets or middlemen? Yes please! /s

mghackerlady5• 22 days ago

well 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• 22 days ago

I very much like the idea, but governance is going to be heck.

elzbardico• 22 days ago

The 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• 22 days ago

I'm currently documenting my research on this at myshape.com/genesis-100.html—would be keen to hear if others are tackling the continuity verification problem from a similar angle.”

skywhopper• 22 days ago

I’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• 22 days ago

reading 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• 21 days ago

We have .local don’t we?

.self: A new top-level domain designed to support self-hosting

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