Known Meta Sites

Then, over the years, little ‘marketing’/‘awareness’/‘speciality’ sites like governmentdrivesafe.example or governmentvaccines.example, or even governmentgetabusehelp.example (it’s actually a similar initialsm, but it’s a place with resources for people to get help), etc started popping up.

So many of these and all that work they did to have one ‘front’ or trusted place to visit is gone? Anyone can register a government<something>.example (they chose a public TLD)… just baffles me honestly. New content from department still appears on their “flagship” site, but also these one offs pop up as well.

They also have, and use, a url shortening service on their main domain (e.g. government.example/{taxes,vehicles,covid} redirects to the longer link on government.example) but instead some departments opt to register domains instead.

At least in FB’s case those might not be for their user’s use (the obscure fb<xyz>.example domains>)?

Has anyone else seen something like this in their local area?

In fact you can see they purchased a bunch of typos of instagram for example, presumably to reduce user exposure to scams on similar domains.

Their help article about this seems to imply that they also use Metamail.com now, but checking my email I am seeing only seeing emails from addresses ending with @email.meta.com

Is it because it's easier to deal with the registrar and pay instead of the internal bureaucracy to assign a domain name?

Is there some technical reason? I know that user-generated content may end up on separate domain for cookie reasons but is there anything else?

And on your question: it is most often the case that a subdomain is owned by the same entity, but it is not a given. The most common thing is a CNAME to some site of a vendor. But you can go all the way to full subdomain delegation (this is the same as going from com. to facebook.com.).

> ako.pinaka.gwapo.sa.ph.corner.static.fbcdn4.com.line.naver.jp.fb.me

> ako.pinaka.gwapo.sa.ph.corner.static.tlcdn4.com.line.naver.jp.fb.me

Everything before "corner" is Filipino and translated it means "I [am] the most handsome in Ph(ilippines)". Hard to explain how this comes across culturally. It's not particularly edgy, more cringe, the kind you'd find in someone's Friendster wall (MySpace never really for big there).

Really curious about `fb.me` now. Haven't seen a good-enough explanation in this thread and I can't be bothered to sleuth them up myself. I'm tending towards this list being not particularly well-curated.

Another curious entry on the list...

server just responds to any subdomain you ask it.

Count your blessings. It's like a version of FB that was forked in 2010 and is used by corps as an internal social network / project management system.

The UX is atrocious, it's extremely difficult to find anything and the permissions are a mess. I worked on a project that used it and was regularly tagged in threads I couldn't access or messaged by people whose names I couldn't see.

I suppose you'd use this by blocking these domains on your firewall, DNS, or in /etc/hosts (resolving them to 0.0.0.0 or some foo).

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