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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”