What if personal domain name registrations could essentially renew on auto-pilot, regardless of changing or expired payment, for decades? It has always bothered me that blogs are like self-published books that self-destruct when expired. After lots of waffling, I think I’m ready to tackle this.
@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 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.
@manton 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.
@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).
@manton I know you’ve been thinking about this for a while. I’m interested to find out where it’s led you.
@manton 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..
@manton 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).
@manton Some of it is inexplicable, I agree. Not sure why some of the odd and boutique-y extensions are so high.
@manton Ah! I should've read closely. I usually get several emails for each domain even though my card is on file and it's set to auto-renew. It may help adding an annual reminder to check if the cards are valid. And yes, add those details in the will so your next of kin can decide 😇
@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.
@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 agreed ... my only outside influence is Bluesky. I have micro.blog cross posting to a couple places but just haven't figured out if I could see/reply to interactions on these other sites on micro.blog. ( I do reply to Mastodon stuff on here but I no longer have any kind of Masto account ) I'm just too lazy to delve into this back 'n' forth right now
