HumanCCF

One of the biggest problems people have when self-hosting their own mail servers is delivery issues because the big email providers don't trust your server. The goal with the shared mail server is to create a server that is trusted by those providers and then making it accessible to users of the .self TLD so they can forward their mail to it and have confidence it will be delivered. It would act only as a relay, users would still self-host their own mailboxes. And nothing would force you to use it.

Please get in touch with us via our contact form, we will need collaborators of all kinds and the human validation problem is going to be the hardest technical challenge to solve. We could use your help! https://hccf.onmy.cloud/get-involved/

Deleting them as they appear.

Enabling digital sovereignty for individuals is our foundational motivating principle!

The fee will fall on us to pay and the gTLD application window is open and our application is in progress. Yes we are crowdfunding (there is a donation link on our website and in the pamphlet) while also actively seeking partners to sponsor us.

Exactly this, the goal is to design a TLD according to human-centered principles. That is, we are assuming (and enforcing) that every endpoint using this domain will be some relatively small-scale environment for personal use. This is what will allow us to provide a lot of neat functionality but only at that scale.

That is a fair criticism, however I would say that the reason we are going for the TLD now is because now is the only time we can do it. The last round of TLD applications was in 2012, so if we don't apply now, it could be a veeery long time before the opportunity comes around again. We are a new org and our goal is to build functionality in parallel with the ICANN application which will likely take years to resolve.

Scam comment deleted.

For this application round, ICANN is running an Applicant Support Program, or ASP. The applicants seeking to apply for a TLD this round who qualify for the ASP will have a substantially reduced application fee, among other benefits. Our organization is one such org who has qualified for the ASP so we will not have to pay the full $227,000 application fee.

Yes, one of the key principles we follow is that all the perks we aim to provide must come with some limit to prevent abuse.

The point is that you are your own hosting provider! We are trying to cater to self-hosters so our goal is to make it as easy as possible for someone with their own homelab to get a domain and have it pointed at the services they want to host.

> In that case it was started by an institution (mozilla) with a lot of heft in the area (mozilla's CA program is one of the most broadly used) and was backed by other orgs (google) that had a vested interest in it's success. I'd be interested to hear which potential sponsors you see in a similar situation here?

We are reaching out to companies who operate in the self-hosted space, academia, ISPs, registars, as well as digital rights orgs. We believe they would be aligned with this mission and ultimately benefit from such a TLD existing!

> What is the plan to (without costly overhead or cost to the end user) validate who is an actual person? Even large corporations with loads of resources have problems with this without resorting to treating it as if a person equals a credit card number.

There are a few emerging technologies we are evaluating to help with this but have not settled on one just yet. Whatever we choose, we will start small and go from there. Worst-case scenario, we start with the credit card approach and iterate. This will ultimately all be a part of the evaluation process we go through with ICANN.

We have considered this, all of these things will be examined during the evaluation process of the application with ICANN before any approval to operate the TLD is granted. We could also police our domain and revoke users who use it for abuse but that may be too costly. But you are right that fundamentally we must protect the reputation of the TLD at all costs and that will require imposing certain limits on its use.

Please submit this to us via our contact form, we will need lots of community input! https://hccf.onmy.cloud/get-involved/

> It's a commons-pollution problem. Are we going to have to start thinking of every word with a dot in the middle as a potential name? IMHO, a new gTLD is justifiable only when there's some concrete differentiator attached to it, e.g. .local indicating mDNS, or .it indicating "Italy"

So the new gTLD round is open right now, we're getting more TLDs whether we like it or not. Our goal is to make one that has features built-in which cater to the self-hosting use case. So that is our key differentiator, that every endpoint leveraging our TLD should be someone's small-scale homelab setup.

> I have no objection to providing people with free subdomains under whatever assignment scheme you guys are using, but wouldn't <something>.net have worked too, and been a lot cheaper?

Technically yes it could work, but given the suite of features we'd like to build into our TLD, it would make things more difficult if we didn't own it. We would be dependent on external parties for our root domain, the root of trust for TLS certificates, all users' subdomains would have an extra dot etc.

> How are you going to pay for the (substantial) cost of running a TLD without registration fee revenue? Is this a loss leader for other services? Are you operating on a 100% donation model?

We plan on operating the domain as a public good and are actively seeking sponsors to help fund us. Think of it as a similar model to ISRG and LetsEncrypt.

> No parking, squatting, or reselling

Our rule of one person per subdomain will hopefully prevent this at scale, though it will admittedly be more difficult to examine any particular domain so closely. We may have to implement some type of heartbeat where the owner of said domain has to respond within a certain amount of time.

We plan to operate a shared mail server than can be used by users of the domain and we will work to ensure it is trusted by imposing usage limits. We will assume that every endpoint in our domain is someone's personal homelab, meaning small-scale use. For large mailing campaigns and newsletters there are plenty of services to choose from that enable those but for just sending personal emails, it should work.

We did not expect this level of response, it should be reachable now.

We are probably going to reserve some of the more obvious ones for specific purposes, e.g. my.self automatically pointing to a homepage on your local network. As we go through the gTLD evaluation process we will be keen to solicit feedback from the community on more specifics!

We don't necessarily, however there are many benefits for doing so. We could simply purchase a domain and then build our initiative beneath it but then everything we do would be beneath that domain, meaning there would be two dots in what is our effective TLD. That would also mean we are a bit beholden to whichever TLD we are beneath and also whichever registrar we purchased our domain from. With the services we hope to offer around things like TLS certs and emails, it just makes more sense for use to own the whole thing from the root.

Indeed, this response is way more than we expected. Trying to set up a web cache now.

This is an idea at this point, the next round of gTLD applications is currently open and we are in the process of applying and we are trying to garner support!

Indeed that appears to be so O_O. Our site is of course self-hosted, this is quite the response. Will have to troubleshoot what the bottleneck is!

Our goal is for .self to be more than just another TLD string, we want to specifically empower the self-hosting use case with local clients that integrate directly with the TLD and operate shared services like mail servers as a public good. We want to dramatically simplify the effort it takes to set up a domain for homelabs and offer free services that are directly tied to the domain like email.