Which TLDs are too risky for hosting?

miles@lemm.ee to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 122 points –

With several Lemmy instances using the .ml TLD Iโ€™ve seen people mention others being risky as well. Which should be avoided?

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Basically any 2-letter TLD should be avoided unless you live in that country.

If you want to be clever, use subdomains and pick one of the new TLDs. For instance, ban.anal.ink, is like $5.

You could also choose a 5-10 digit .xyz domain, those cost $โ‚ฌ0.85

Except for the only one I'd want:

The first year. Then it's likely $12/year.

No, everything with the specified format is $0.99.

https://gen.xyz/cn/blog/1111b-sites

Weird, because I've had an .xyz domain for years, and after the first year the price goes up.

Just to add another concrete example, I saw a toot recently that .af may be risky, as some countries are beginning to implement embargoes; the person who had a domain there may be losing it soon

1 more...

A big one is the .nu domain, which is extremely popular in Sweden (since "nu" means "now" in Swedish).

It's currently controlled by the same large non-profit that controls .se (Internet Foundation in Sweden, IIS), but Niue has been wanting control of it for decades. It's a complicated issue since .nu addresses have become incredibly important to Swedish Internet infrastructure.

Litigation was launched in 2020 but I'm not aware of any news since then.

Some TLDs that aren't country codes but also aren't very useful or popular will sometimes be blanket blocked by institutions, on the theory that there's so many more garbage malware C&Cs or whatever than actual useful sites that it makes sense to ban the whole thing. So you might not want to go with .bingo or .rest or anything with no perceivable use.

I suppose free ones, new generic TLDs that aren't owned by some trustworthy company or organization that will probably continue to exist for the forseeable future, and country code TLDs from countries without stable governments or a reputable institution managing the TLD.

If you're hosting an instance on a risky TLD and you wanna migrate, probably best to close signups now and disallow any new communities from being created on there

.biz always seemed a bit sketchy. Would probably also avoid .nk

On an unrelated note, who is sitting on lemmy.games? We need a gaming dedicated instance. I got lemmygames.net but lemmy.games would make me happy.

Personally I would prefer if we didn't use "Lemmy" for everything. I really like programming.dev as a software development based instances. Also makes it less confusing if an instance decides to change to kbin or a future compatible server.

.fan.

But seriously...

After spending all week installing Lemmy and trying to make it happy, I was losing my mind. I've finally got everything but pics working. I plan on troubleshooting it this weekend.

I'm being sarcastic, kind of. I wasn't sure if I was going to stay a Lemmy fan amidst the painful set up - even with Docker compose and following all of the instructions, I was struggling to self-host it.

I am still a Lemmy fan and I understand that I should do less complaining and more contributing, so I am going to write up my experience getting it running once I get the pictrs stuff working. I love the federation and want to help it thrive.

What did you install it on a๏ฟผnd with instructions did you use? I installed it on my Synology NAS๏ฟผ, which took about 30 minutes using this guide. I was honestly impressed with how easy it was to install. https://mariushosting.com/how-to-install-lemmy-on-your-synology-nas/

Funny that you say that: my first problem was of my own making - I was using arm64 hardware and Lemmy doesn't quite support that architecture yet, so I ended up getting a Synology myself this week. It's awaiting disks and then I plan on moving Lemmy to that box.

Thanks for sharing that site - I'll make good use of it once the drives get here.

The instructions worked out, but the troubleshooting steps need to be fleshed out more. Again, probably my issues, like DNS. I learned a lot though.

I love my Synology NAS. Itโ€™s the DS920+. Iโ€™ve had it for a couple years. I upgraded the memory to 8 GB and use Portainer for a docket UI. I have 24 containers running on my NAS now, including sab, radarr, sonarr, deluge, joplin, piped/hyperpipe, youtubedl, jellyfin, pihole, and lemmy. 8gb of memory and about 45% used. Plex also runs as a native DSM package.

I've got the DS923+. It's replacing a very old but very functional QNAP that I've had for years. Alas, QTS or whatever the OS is called is slow and clunky and after using our DS920+ at work I made the decision to get a Synology.

I had trouble self hosting as well. Actually it was federation after the initial set up which was the problem. I gave up for now tho.