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Comment by simonhamp | Hacker News Reader

It's not just a subdomain. It's the landing page, an email address with forwarding, creation of a Mastodon account on their instance... there's a lot there.

$20/year is actually a bargain as it would likely cost you more than that each month to run all of that yourself

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That's great until they get bored of running the service and you've now lost all of the aforementioned which are dependent on their domain.

Seems like a bit of fun. I've definitely thought even less about something before parting with $20 on it /shrug

It is not the $20 that is a the main problem. Backlinks to your profile and contacts with that email address for example.

I mean you could say the same about any business. I fail to see how this is unique in that regard.

Many DNS registrars offer very similar sets of value-add services for free for real TLDs people buy through them. Web "parking pages" and vanity email forwarding are table stakes.

What wouldn't be table stakes, would be if each of these was its own Mastodon instance, or something else like that that actually had an OpEx cost.

Trouble is, many registrars do with with way worse UX. I own domains from two registrars and loathe to use their interfaces.

A DNS server, landing page and email can be had for free. For the rest there are free alternatives like twitter, pastebin, etc.

I get it, but $20 still seems rather high for that. Anyway, it's a cool website.

Interesting... I share that feeling, yet, if they actually positioned this as:

"Pay 20usd/y for your social account in our mastodon instance and get free subdomain, webpage and email forwarding"

I would find this totally acceptable, considering the potential costs of actually running a mastodon instance.

There are plenty of free-to-use Mastodon instances. They claim theirs is nicer, but it's hard to tell upfront, so it makes sense to me that they'd focus on the whole personal homepage aspect.

If I liked the omg.lol domain name a ton, I'd pay for this.

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