[iomcr]

While true, a free and open web is generally desirable, and we'd like to keep the barriers of entry for federation to a minimum. If someone was ready to start mycool.forum, but doesn't have $500/yr to start a website, they must now wade through a garbage pile of "minimum $2,000 bid" squatted domains, weird TLDs that could declare your domain premium and charge $400,000/yr at any time, maybe even if the only thing "premium" about the name is that your website got popular, or buy a domain like themycoolforum50.com.

This might be only one managable issue, but these things add up, and the more they add up, the more facebook becomes the only website people use.

[beprogrammed]

Agreed, that's why I never use or recommend any else use any of the domains run by private operators, just asking for troubles like the above. The attempted sale of org was scary.

Which is all very unfortunate because some of those TLDs are quite nice, like .forum. What a mess we've gotten ourselves into.

Should have been kept as a public service, but no putting the genie back in the bottle now. Only way out of this mess is a distributed system, but I can't imagine what that would like without a massive proliferation of competing services.