@manton i feel like using payment as a way to prevent dns squatting/fund the service isn't very effective and leads to exactly what you talk about

@manton DNS would work just fine with funding from governments & sponsors

@manton The work that archive.org is doing it meant to save blogs from this fate.

Does this mean (sorry if I’m misunderstanding) that we may be able to register domain names here in the future? I would love that. Mine is managed through wordpress and I’d love to handle everything here.

@croc The Internet Archive is amazing. It just can’t fix broken links all across the web, and normal people don’t know it exists. Integration with more tools (and browsers) would help.

@jabel Oh, actually we already do offer domain registration and transfers! Sort of hidden, click Account and look for the “Get a Domain Name” button.

Oh, cool! Thanks.

there was, or maybe still is, a WordPress plugin that would prompt the archive to archive any links you posted. AFAIR it was meant to point to the archive if links broke. Not sure that it fully worked. I remove it at some point. A great idea though.
I’ve got some, probably klunky, JavaScript on my site that changes links to my old school site to ones on the archive.

@johnjohnston I think that’s great too. Micro.blog has something similar, although it doesn’t automatically update old links yet.

Excited to see what you come up with!

@manton …which reminded me to log in to my name provider to check my payment card status which turned out to have expired 3 years ago !!! (I last paid for 5 years). Now updated to be good for the next renewal (next year).

I know you’ve been thinking about this for a while. I’m interested to find out where it’s led you.

not just the domain names, but the hosting too. I know Micro.blog is special about this, but probably every other hosting platform will remove your content as soon as the payment bounces..

If domains were free, there would be no disincentive to hoarding. I suspect the essentially nominal cost works as an incentive to use it or let it go.

@dwalbert I’m not necessarily saying domain names should be free, although I do think some of the pricing has gotten out of hand.

@pratik They renew. The key is the “decades” part, because a lot can go wrong if no one is paying attention (most notably expired cards and death).

Some of it is inexplicable, I agree. Not sure why some of the odd and boutique-y extensions are so high.

@manton it would be lovely to set these things up to last centuries. My immediate descendants probably don’t care enough about my works, but future generations might find value in them. I want to bridge that potential gap without burdening any one individual. There’s an unsolved need here and I believe it will need some sort of foundation to fully address.

@manton @krinkle How would you handle changing/expired payment types?

@ramsey @krinkle I have some ideas which I’ll blog about later, but essentially there would need to be an organization that handled a pool of money that could be used across members.

@aloysius The custom domain wouldn’t work of course, but a GitHub subdomain would likely work for years or decades to come. I have a lot of faith in GitHub, which is one of the reasons I first added mirroring to it in Micro.blog.

@manton @krinkle Currently, I have auto-renew turned on, and it’s connected to my PayPal account, which is nice.

@krinkle @manton I’m having difficulty grasping the concept you’re describing, which is probably due to being entrenched in a capitalistic culture.

@krinkle @manton Is Microblog a registrar?

@krinkle @ramsey I love this pricing idea. Micro.blog is not a registrar (we use Name.com’s API) and getting a new TLD is way out of reach, unfortunately. It feels like there should be more innovation in domain pricing than we’ve gotten.