In most cases a domain is going to be like .1% of your costs of running a Peertube instance tbh
I like Njalla. Pay with crypto, and privacy respecting.
.ml is free, and probably why lemmy uses it.
Lemmy used
.mlin it’s infancy, and it’s impossible to switch domain names now.I can attest to the cons of .ml domains
- Corporate networks sometimes block them (like mine)
- Freenom is really sketchy
- Email providers block them
- Harms SEO (google will target less at people in us and more at people in wherever the hell .ml is from)
it’s definitely not impossible to change, not only is lemmy a very new site, but it’s especially possible since they’re not dependent on SEO for current growth (nor can they grow as well with .ml as you pointed out). all they would have to do is to redirect lemmy.ml to a new domain like lemmy.social or whatever, and maintain a statement that the new domain is their primary. after a year or two, the volume of people using .ml would be minimal to none.
You can’t just change a federated domain like you can change from facebook.com to meta.com, it’s nearly impossible
You would essentially be shutting down your instance and starting up a new one with existing content. And you would have to rebuild your network of federations. I’d say it’s not “nearly impossible” especially if you give advanced notice of the change (think, weeks), but definitely a pain.
why?
I’m not a fediverse developer but as I understand it the activitypub spec identities people and communities by their domain, and does not define a way to mutate.
Translation: you would loose all your peers and your comments.
If lemmy.ml copied the databases to a new domain, then when websites start to peer again there would be duplicate comments, one from the old domain and one from the new domain.
Translation: it would require the cooperation of every instance to be clean
I’m not a fediverse developer again, this could be wrong
even if that’s the case, cooperation from the satellite instances wouldn’t be hard. since, as it’s been said, .ml domains are bad for a myriad of reasons, so for the future of the project and everyone participating, it would be in the best interest of everyone to do this. especially this early on, before it gets too big to execute such action.
Could probably use a free dynamic DNS service, but then you’ll have to be ok using a subdomain.
Most registrars now offer that along with the $12/year name. And at least for open source firmware, most routers have a client built-in. Not that my cable modem dynamic ip has changed in years.
if i understand correctly, freenom.com offers .tk, .ml, .ga, .cf, and .gq domains for free.
i haven’t tried it and don’t know the terms or if there is some caveat.
Freenom attempts to take your domains after you miss a reregistration or if they decide to, without emailing you.
You then need to buy the domain because you have linked to it everywhere
