Franken.domains: Stitched-Together Domains, Because Every .com Is Taken (franken.domains)
30 points by klausbreyer 6 hours ago
SoftTalker 4 hours ago
Be wary of vanity TLDs and even some country codes, they may be available but once the renewal rolls around and you've invested time and effort into establishing a presence there, you may be in for a price shock.
inigyou 3 hours ago
You're also subject to US law on anything that isn't a ccTLD and even several ccTLDs.
echelon 3 hours ago
"cod.ing" ... available!?
Someone just dropped their registration for that today!?
Namecheap...
Hurry...
Login, come on...
TOTP, uagh...
Come on, come on... register, register...
...
$39,000.00 !??!
"Premium" name?!
What is this garbage?
gruez 3 hours ago
>What is this garbage?
Registries realized they can capture the value from premium domains rather than letting domain speculators profit.
matheusmoreira 2 hours ago
reticulates 4 hours ago
moffkalast 4 hours ago
It's always struck me as odd that TLDs are not just, well, freely configurable? Domains have always been subject to so much artificial scarcity for seemingly no reason. Why can't a DNS resolver handle .whatever?
inigyou 3 hours ago
The social fabric of the system would fall apart if people could trivially buy top level domains. Even the not so trivial buying that ICANN began in 2015 in order to profiteer was a serious mistake (to everyone besides ICANN).
it would be a global first come first serve namespace. Everything conceivable would be registered. Only the diversity of TLDs and SLDs saves the current DNS from this. In fact ICANN's money-grubbing TLD spam actually improved this, since there are now far too many TLDs to squat them all.
christina97 3 hours ago
This wouldn’t really reduce the scarcity though. Right now everyone wants a “.com”, because it’s the convention. If you could buy the TLD “widget” for the same price as “widget.com”, then you would just move up one level in the domain hierarchy and have the same scarcity? If anything, the fact that there are several legitimate TLD options reduces the scarcity a tiny bit?
As an aside (I’m also annoyed by domain squatters etc), it is a fascinating market study how domains are artificially scarce the way they are when everyone can easily and cheaply buy them. I am not sure there is any reasonable solution to it.
culi 4 hours ago
Maybe it's useful for ICANN to delegate management to different orgs (mostly corporations) so they don't have to control every single website on earth directly
I would actually prefer for the ICANN to have even less power and for the whole system to be even more distributed
inigyou 3 hours ago
Foorack 4 hours ago
It can, you just need to pay $210,000 to buy that TLD.
dgellow 3 hours ago
moffkalast 4 hours ago
matheusmoreira 2 hours ago
What's odd is there seems to be no viable alternatives to DNS at all. Everybody just standardized on this ancient phone book technology managed by some rent seeking "assigned numbers" organization and now there is no escape from it.
PunchyHamster 3 hours ago
The reason is money
charcircuit 2 hours ago
It can. You just have to abandon ICANN's system.
Grombobulous 3 hours ago
These are fun but regular people have so much difficulty with them.
I once snagged a 4 letter .net address that was the last 3 letters of my first name with the first initial of my last name as the last character.
I thought I was so clever. I had the shortest email address you could ever imagine and it was basically just my first name and last initial. Amazing!
Nobody got it. It was confusing. I got blank stares and confused looks. People basically refused to email me at my new address.
Sometimes long is better, and sometimes unique and easy to spell is better, too.
Examples like Pinterest or Expedia are good demonstrators. They are easy to spell when you hear the word, and they were unique words that at the time were obviously going be available. Sure, Expedia is a very old domain, but if the company didn’t exist today I’d almost guarantee you a new company looking to buy the domain would be able to find it in 2026.
sodapopcan 2 hours ago
Ya, I have an .st domain with is <my-first-name>@<first-three-letters-of-last-name>.st and I've had a few people have a lot of trouble with it. With one, it took about 6 or 7 tries to explain it to him before I just took over and typed it for him. Most people do get it, though, and sometimes think it's neat.
avunit 2 hours ago
Very true, I found a similar issue with vanity/hack domains too. Picked up https://jo.hn a couple of years ago and the confusion it causes isn't really worth the cool-factor most of the time!
They tend to really just be suitable as a supplementary domain for short links and the like (youtu.be, goo.gl, etc.)
Grombobulous 2 hours ago
I have even had people confused at [last name].io even though tech industry folks consider that one really common.
I can see why many companies end up paying lots of money to transition over to .com when they get to a certain size.
ZPrimed 2 hours ago
i have a 3-letter .onl domain that is the first 3 letters of my last name
I have actually needed to use it, because my cell provider (Visible) has absolutely moronic form validation that doesn't recognize a hyphen as a valid character in an email address, even though it very much is. (My main .net domain has a hyphen in it)
Retr0id 4 hours ago
An impressively busy UI for such low information density.
agys 4 hours ago
dgellow 3 hours ago
haha, that's one of the best web animation I've seen. Nice job. Love how interactive it is
seemaze 3 hours ago
Tried until I ran out of 'dissections' with zero results on known good domains..
It seems like it just matches a list of precomputed entries, but does no actual operation of the user input.
seydor 3 hours ago
there s always a .com with some imagination
sixtyj 3 hours ago
And if you find one as available, book it and pay it immediately.
bthornbury 3 hours ago
lots of good ones still
doublerabbit 4 hours ago
Thanks to Brexit, I lost my .eu domains. This really pissed me off.
Maybe it's a good thing we are all afraid to visit any other tld other than dotCom.
inigyou 3 hours ago
You could've found an EU person to hold the domains for you btw.
Regardless, it's usually politically safest to put your domains under your own country's ccTLD. That way, you're exposed to one fewer country's dumb politics.
doublerabbit 3 hours ago
> you're exposed to one fewer country's dumb politics.
That would be .co.uk, so, jail time for hosting memes.
inigyou 32 minutes ago
arccy 3 hours ago
except if you choose to move, change nationalities, or the government suddenly doesn't like you
culi 4 hours ago
dot org is right there and is at least run by a non profit. The SAVE .ORG campaign succeeded in preventing private equity from buying it out. Thanks to EFF, Wikipedia, NPR, Greenpeace, the YMCA, and even the Girl Scouts!
jsrcout 3 hours ago
Yikes, must have missed that one. Horrifying thought.
ck2 4 hours ago
I'm surprised that "AI" right inside most search engines these days was not the final nail in the coffin of domain importance, and specifically .com
browsers hiding most of the URL also negated much of the importance and was a nail
QR codes on everything and all phones in everyone's hands all the time was another nail
You just don't want a scammy TLD but not even sure what those are these days anymore