sci-hub.se is still accessible to me on EE and Virgin Media.
Edit: s/scihub/sci-hub/
Sci-Hub, a pirate library of academic papers censored by Twitter, PayPal and domain systems, left the distributed domain platform Handshake after two days, unsatisfied by the level of decentralization. ...
“I first just thought that another domain for Sci-Hub won’t hurt. But later I realized it’s them who really controls the domain, not me,” Elbakyan told CoinDesk via Telegram.
The Namebase team reached out to Elbakyan after Sci-Hub was banned by Twitter, reportedly due to a new copyright infringement case in India, she said.
“They wrote to me when I was having that stressful situation with Twitter,” Elbakyan said. “I just gave them an IP address and they connected it to the domain. That’s all I did. Now, where is the decentralization?” ...
“In fact, I’m not in control and they can throw me out at any moment, just like Twitter did. And yes, all domain services are like that, including .se and .do, but they aren’t promoting themselves as decentralized. Plus, those are reputable ones, and this is God knows who. They are just using Sci-Hub to promote this weird project,” Elbakyan said. ...
https://www.coindesk.com/sci-hub-leaves-handshake-blockchain
She thought that having her own TLD was a hassle, so they gave her a second-level domain the TLD of which they managed themselves, but she didn't like that because they managed it.
This could have been very easily solved if she was fine with them giving her www.sci-hub, but it sounds like she thought that owning a TLD would somehow be more hassle than owning a second-level domain. It doesn't sound very reasonable to me, sounds like a misunderstanding.
There was this ICANN session a while back (streamable on zoom) with folks from both Handshake and GNU Name System devs making each a presentation about their "emerging identifiers". I found it really interesting to see how the two projects cover (in my view) different grounds.