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The Perils of an .xyz Domain

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101–110 of 282 posts

Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#101
post #47

Well .COM has had its day. There (was?) even a semi-parody site called Domains For the Rest of Us[0] that generates .COM domains that you can use for side projects (or startups?). [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24538758 The new gTLDs are a godsend since all the domain hacks have been largely exhausted. E.G: `del.icio.us`. I like the new avalanche of gTLDs since it reduces domain squatting, domain hacks, and…

I read a series of blog posts about a guy who would essentially work backwards from a domain name to start a business. E.g. he would buy things like 'weehawkenjobboard.com' then SEO a job listing service for people/businesses in Weehawken NJ. I thought it was a pretty clever strategy.

That’s what I do too.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26380124

building one product at a time.

Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#102
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had .email for a while. Many shopping sites wouldn't actually let you use the address, presumably given some filter assuming that "email" was a fake address. Because my name ends with "ss", I switched over to .es, which conveniently is a country TLD (Spain). That's worked very well, though occasionally I'll get spam in Spanish, which cracks me up.

I wonder how well these new TLDs work for custom email if you use them with Google Workspaces / Google Apps for Domains or another reputable email hosting service. I've been using a custom domain (though a .net) for decades now and since I moved to Google Apps years ago I haven't had an issue being seen as spam.

I use the free email provided with the domain hosting I got with a domain on one of these gTLDs. The only real issue I get are places that think the gTLD isn't a valid email domain, ensuring I always have to fall back to a more traditional email provider for some places.

Otherwise, deliverability-wise I haven't really experienced any issues. My mail is regularly delivered to the big email providers.

Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#103
The reality of Internet filtering and firewalls, and a rule generalisable to any attempt at control and autonomy, is that the effect-to-effort ratio matters. The principle of a small effort with a large result is behind the architecture of every switch, gate, door, valve, or dam.

New generic TLDs have the disadvantage of being recently unleashed. There are no venerable sites on XYZ, or its siblings. Much of what's registered there, and that word was "much" and not "all", is absolutely unworthy crap. And for those who are faced with defending either their own or their customers, clients, users, employees, or other stakeholder's security and time, wholesale blocking of the entire TLD solves a lot of problems with very little downside cost.

The obvious response is "but there's a lot of crap on legacy TLDs as well". Yes, there is, but there are also valued, venerable, and essential domains, and blocking all of them is not a viable option. (Though the prospect of whitelisting is becoming increasingly attractive.)

I've known people who are, on the one hand, Internet freedom advocates of decades-long standing --- before most people reading this were born. Who wholesale block access by all China ASNs to their webservers --- because all they see from such networks is malicious traffic. Again: effect-to-effort ratio here is high.

No, it's not "fair". Yes, there's collateral damage. But you're absolutely fighting not merely human nature but all of control theory in trying to combat this.

Register on XYZ and you'll be increasingly fighting a common practice of default-deny, whitelist-by-request. For every user you're trying to reach.

And you should ask yourself if it's really worth it.

XYZ, meantime, are mining and arbiraging short-term cashflow for long-term reputation at the specific expense of its legitimate customers. Those with the least bit of sense will abandon the registrar, leading to an ever-accelerating reputational death spiral.

Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#104
post #101
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read a series of blog posts about a guy who would essentially work backwards from a domain name to start a business. E.g. he would buy things like 'weehawkenjobboard.com' then SEO a job listing service for people/businesses in Weehawken NJ. I thought it was a pretty clever strategy.

That’s what I do too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26380124 building one product at a time.

It’s also how I code apps btw. I use this same approach for libraries I find on HN.

Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#105
post #92

Before I get into email business(I run my own email forwarding service[0]), I don't understand why provider block those domains. Then I immediately got it. The amount of spam emails from .xyz .click .faith .top is huge. And with every email comes from them, we have to run spam scanner, which isn't cheap. So we have to score those TLDs more sensitive. https://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/tlds/ can give some insight abo…

From that spamhaus link .xyz has a lower bad percentage (4.4%) than .com (5.1%) and .net (10.5%).

What are its positives?

Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#106
post #11

These are also good reasons to avoid using .so domains. You can also expect mail delivery issues and blanket corporate firewall blocks on .so. The rising prominence of https://notion.so is changing the cultural situation somewhat, but very slowly. (Edit: I work at Notion)

I have been exclusively using a .so domain for about 10 years and never experienced any of these issues. What specific network blocks it?

You can see a bunch of users reporting this issue in the link the user above posted: https://www.reddit.com/r/Notion/comments/f6x9mk/why_the_so_d...

Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#107
post #11

These are also good reasons to avoid using .so domains. You can also expect mail delivery issues and blanket corporate firewall blocks on .so. The rising prominence of https://notion.so is changing the cultural situation somewhat, but very slowly. (Edit: I work at Notion)

Notion said they were switching to .com "as soon as our engineering team has the bandwidth", but it's been a year so they might've changed their minds on disrupting the branding https://www.reddit.com/r/Notion/comments/f6x9mk/why_the_so_d...

I don’t think we consider ‘.so’ part of the brand.

Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#108
post #83
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read a series of blog posts about a guy who would essentially work backwards from a domain name to start a business. E.g. he would buy things like 'weehawkenjobboard.com' then SEO a job listing service for people/businesses in Weehawken NJ. I thought it was a pretty clever strategy.

Was it this[0] guy? Previously discussed on HN[1][2]. [0] https://www.deepsouthventures.com [1] https://www.deepsouthventures.com/i-sell-onions-on-the-inter... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19728132

That’s the one

Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#109
post #87

If I ever start a super-secret club, I now know what the domain name TLD should be. Nobody would be able to spread the secret!

Personally, I'd go for some non-printable characters. But, maybe I'm just nostalgic for when starting a directory name with ALT+255 rendered the directory inaccessible to Windows 9x...

Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>It's certainly censorship if a monopolistic or oligopolistic platform does it this seems like a good point, I'll have to think on it. For this particular situation I'm having a hard time seeing the argument on the basis that .xyz domains are cheap and get used for lots of attacks as stated in the article, so is it censorship or defense? I think the question at the heart of my disagreement would be "what speech is b…

It would get deep into the grey area if Google users had any capacity of enabling the communications with those sites. As of today, Google is the one in control of the communications, and dictate who can reach anybody over most of the internet. They just don't have a policy of empowering their users to decide who they want to talk to. What speech is being censored is harder to discover. They are blocking people from…

OK, I think we are probably pretty close in agreement. I still don't think censorship is the appropriate word here but also want to be clear that is what I am disagreeing about, not any of the larger issues.
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