2024-5-30
I debated the name of this article for some time. Eventually I settled on “Switching to Mooo and what this means for me and you.”
I liked my mathu.ml domain name. It had a lot of things going for it.
But now that domain is no more. Freenom has recently gone under and I have not found a lot of coverage about this. This was one of the last ways for most people to have access to a top level domain service that could route traffic to them, for free. Now, I understand that this is a bit of a gray issue, especially with Freenom, but let me advocate against this change for a bit.
The internet is becoming increasingly centralized, and the high prices for domains act against this. I personally think that for the most part, the access to a top level, at least slightly professional looking domain that Freenom gave lended a sense of legitimacy to websites for free. For me, this felt like a much better solution for my website than some random subdomain, or even worse, being hosted under a single domain that hosts many websites, something like Google Sites.
For the latter of those, I am highly opposed to ever truly doing something like that. If you don’t actually have the capacity to host a website by yourself, I think you have very little control over it. With Google Sites, this is quite obvious with the clear restrictions they put on your site, but even if those were gone, Google would still retain the ability to take down your site at a moment’s notice. They would still retain the ability to kill off Google Sites like they have done for so many other products. But maybe I’m slightly paranoid. Still, this gives Google, or any company hosting websites, plenty of data and leads to a more and more centralized version of the web. Now, I could go on and on about this, but the baseline is that a restriction in the ability to cheaply get a top level domain leads to big tech exherting more control over us, inevitably encroaching on our privacy and freedom.
On the other hand, Freenom was a bit of a scam hosting service. They were very difficult to actually use properly, and also (allegedly) would claim domains if they got too popular. Eventually, due to their overall scammy behavior, they got their liscence as a registrar revoked and can now no longer register domains. Additionally, in the big scheme of things, TLDs are really not that expensive. Most of them can be found for a solid $20/year which, given a minimum wage of $7.25 (at the tme of writing) in the US is only around three hours of work.
I personally am moving onto FreeDNS with this new domain. All my sites should be accessible soon through this new domain. Basically “mathu.ml” will just turn into “mathuml.mooo.com”. Basically, nothing changes. In the long term I may buy an actual domain, but only time will tell.