ownDomain — julian

Wanted: Digital Dreams

Mon, 08 Sep 2025 11:15:00 +0000

In this corner of my world, I seek a better digital life, one where I own my own digital identity, where I am not forced to be a microsoft or facebook user just because my school or family use them, one where I get to choose my digital service providers to suit my values...

In this corner of my world, I plan how I might achieve this using open-standard protocols, open-source software, replaceable services...

In this corner of my world, in order to get some of this digital sovereignty in my own life, and to learn skills to help build the better world, I practice “self-hosting”, but in great frustration knowing full well it's so far away from the needed solutions...

In this corner of my world, I am meeting lots of people with similar views, and hearing lots of comments like X is bad, Y is an open-standard protocol, Z is an ethical service...

But I am rarely hearing people's imagination of how it all works in this new, better world.

How does a family pick up a laptop and a tablet and a smart-phone and a printer and some on-line service providers in this new world, and get on with managing their family archives and their school work and their chats and calls and diaries? How do they transfer photos between their devices, find a document they wrote or scanned earlier, verify their human identity when needed, choose and change their messaging service providers?

A common pitfall is thinking in terms of apps. Nextcloud, Fediverse, Jitsi-meet, Matrix, Linux, open-this, libre-that. Great, those are useful components, but they are not the picture.

Do we imagine each home running a little Microsoft replacement and a compressed Google compatible service in their home router box? Do we see communities running big servers for their citizens? Do we dream of peer-to-peer local-first apps, operating independent of network services? Maybe some of these are involved, but how would it actually work from the user's point of view? How do we pay for it? In what ways can we demonstrate it working better than today's Big Tech model?

Without this imagined new way of working, we are swimming in a sea of bits of software and protocols and services and funding campaigns for the same. Without our shared vision, how will all these little bits ever come together?

Once we see the big picture, we'll enjoy plugging the little bits together into a pattern. Look! — project Z implemented this bit of the picture, so now they interoperate with all those adjacent projects. Look! — project Y needs help with solving that other bit of the picture. Look! — two incompatible protocols — we want to plug those areas together so let's do something about it.

A few times I have had a go at writing down how things work “in my dream world”. I'm not short of ideas, but it takes time and effort, I'm not so great at telling stories, and I don't have all the dreams. I want to write and share more of my own dreams, and I also want to read how it all works in your dreams. Bouncing ideas back and forth with others is stimulating. It's important. More and more I am thinking how much better we could work together if we shared these dream stories. Stories in words. Stories in pictures too.

Where are our dreams? Who will write them down, draw the big pictures, share the visions?

#ownDomain

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Need a Not-Evil Email Provider?

Mon, 27 Nov 2023 22:37:36 +0000

Changing your email provider? Concerned about surveillance and misaligned incentives of a free account at Google, Microsoft, Apple and the like? I'll tell you what I think.

You might have heard, “If you're not paying for the product, you are the product.” It means when they give us email “for free”, their real customers (advertisers) are paying them for our data, buying our attention, buying our loyalty.

If you want not-evil, you have to pay for it.

(Thanks for that quote, Adrian!)

My choice: I use and recommend FastMail, https://fastmail.com . Australian company with good world-wide coverage and credentials. Their “standard” package at around £5/month.

Own Domain

Call Me By My Name

Before you sign up with any provider, take a moment to consider one thing. If you are leaving a free provider, you have to change your email address. Why? Because you didn't own your address, they did. So you can't take it with you. You have to change it to a new one.

But now, if you're willing to pay for email at all, this is your opportunity: you can make a huge leap to future-proof yourself, by moving to your own domain. (More about #ownDomain.)

After choosing and registering your own (or family) domain name with a domain name registrar (around £1 — £2 a month), you can use that for email. You can Bring Your Own Domain to an email provider and ask them to provide email service on it. That's how I run my own email address, at my family domain name, through Fastmail. That way, one day if when an email provider closes down or becomes unfavourable — like how I once thought gmail was lovely and later changed to the opposite view — then we can migrate to another provider without all the hassle associated with changing address.

Being addressed as me@my-domain makes me feel good. It's so much nicer than being known as my-name@somebody-elses-company.

Alternative Alias Addresses

On such a plan, I can create “aliases” for free. I made an “our-initials@our-domain” alias which redirects to both my and my wife's addresses, which is useful for shopping and family activities. They only charge per mailbox where mail is delivered (I have exactly one mailbox), no extra charge for these “redirection aliases” or for additional addresses that deliver to the same mail box.

See also my short post Own-Domain Email with Fastmail – Pros and Cons in which I also talk about my choice of freedom/libre/open-source mail client software (K-9 Mail, Thunderbird, Mailspring).

#ownDomain

Fediverse-Ideas #41: Bring Your Own IDentity (BYOID)

Sat, 23 Sep 2023 13:41:00 +0000

POSSE: I posted this in “fediverse-ideas” as Bring Your Own IDentity (BYOID) #41, on 2023-09-23. Comments are included below.

Related to development of all social (people-focused) communications and sharing systems, fediverse included.

Own Domain

We can't build people-oriented social tech in the way that Big Tech do, where they say “this is our system, you'll have an address @ our-big-tech-domain, and all your links belong to us.”

Earlier today I replied to Johannes Ernst who observed that people shouldn't need to think about the difference between someone's fediverse handle and their email address, they should be the same. I wrote,

@J12t Absolutely! We should just need “my address”. I've been writing about aspects of this. And it's strongly tied in with the value of having one's own address at one's own domain. Don't want my email addr to be me @ mastodon, nor my fediverse to be me @ gmail :–) rather I want them both me @ my-domain. And to make that efficient and affordable, servers (and server operators) must support Bring Your Own Identity #BYOID .

https://wrily.foad.me.uk/tag:ownDomain

Own Domain is a truly cross-platform issue. It applies to matrix just as to fediverse and others. It's about bringing the person to the centre.

A recent key insight I had was actually “my own” registered domain isn't necessary. A substantial part of the value is in having an address at a domain that isn't belonging to a particular one of the service providers we use, but in having the use of an address at a domain that belongs to someone, anyone, whom we trust to let us use it for the long term. Could be a company, one's government, a charity. The key is to be able to switch and mix service providers without borrowing a new and different address from each one.

Main issues include:

getting server software to support BYOID
getting server operators to support and encourage BYOID (and adapt to doing their brand recognition a different way)
making domain registration easier and cheaper and reliable for ordinary folks (includes sub issues such as: facilitating subdomain use, see Public Suffix List)
making domain management easy, standardised, automated, at least as far as enabling providers of matrix/mastodon/etc. be able to plug in their service to my domain with minimal effort on my part)

I'm presupposing, by bringing up this topic in this forum, that a majority of readers here will understand the reasons why this direction makes sense. (That's something I have tried to write about on my blog but, though I try, explaining and appealing to normies to understand the importance is not my forté.)

I feel like we're missing something, that having all my different protocol addresses matching isn't merely about being easy to remember, it's not a trivial nicety. It's somehow a key to building deeper integration of our personal data within our personal tech. It's hard to think of use cases that can't be achieved by linking to external sites the way we do now, but my intuition is integration can be done better this way.

And I think BYOID goes a huge way towards solving the account “portability” issue.

Yet our delightful new federated things, wonderful in themselves, are yet, still, being built as big tech mono-sites: “join us and get our lovely service at our address” (mastodon.anything, fedi-thing.whatever, matrix-circles, matrix.org, beeper.com, on and on add infinitum).

Only a few rays radiate in the right direction:

ye olde email (BYOID is widely available)
Blue Sky spec (but, sadly, not the blue sky central server)

(I thought I'd be able to name more.)

Running the service oneself, be it email or fedi or matrix, isn't easy. I self-host only in order to bring my own domain, not because I want to. Currently without self-hosting I explain it as I'm Unable To Be Me .

Discussion:

Social Coding FSDL matrix room #socialcoding-foundations:matrix.org (alternate link)

Idea #23 Domain names as handles

(EDIT 2023-12-23: Typo “people should –> shouldn't need to think”.)

glyn commented 2023-12-12:

Another advantage of BYOID would be to retain one's identity when migrating accounts between servers, as happens in the fediverse.

I can see the attraction of using domain names as identities as it leverages the current DNS infrastructure. However, it seems that the requirements for BYOID are fewer than those of domain names, so a much cheaper solution could be found.

Have you looked at identities via keyoxide.org and similar technology?

circlebuilder commented 2023-12-13:

FYI There's an issue on Federating Keyoxide.

glyn commented 2023-12-21:

One aspect is puzzling me. How would BYOID work when applied to more than one type of ActivityPub service, e.g. microblogging on a Mastodon instance and photo sharing on a pixelfed instance?

For example, if I used BYOID on both a Mastodon and a pixelfed instance, which instance would my id refer to? Or, putting it a other way, how could I refer to myself on one or other of the instances?

julianfoad commented 2023-12-23:

@glyn: Bring Your Own ID does not mean we have only one ID we can bring. We can still use a separate ID for each service. Let's say my preferred handle is “julian”. I can bring “julian@toot.mydomain” to the microblogging service, and bring “@julian@pix.mydomain” to the pixelfed service. (Or any other format that works, perhaps “@julian+{toot,pix}@mydomain”.) The essential point is that these ids are under my control (perhaps delegated to some third-party of my choosing) rather than controlled by the provider of my “toot” and “pix” services.

So, that's the first level.

In addition, I also write about how I would like to use one and the same ID for multiple services, here and in some of my blog posts. That's a more involved thing than Bring Your Own ID. I would like to explore that further but haven't yet, beyond observing that the syntax differences across different protocols (like whether to write a leading '@' sign) are superficial.

#ownDomain #POSSE #fediverse #matrix

I'm Unable To Be Me

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 13:33:17 +0000

Self-hosting: it's difficult, inefficient, fragile. So why do I do it?

I self-host, unwillingly, in order to own my own identity. I insist on my online identity being independent. I don't accept being Julian @ some-messaging-co or Julian @ some-video-sharing-co today, and Julian @ some-other-co tomorrow. I'm just Julian @ my-own-domain. Services may come and go, while this remains my identity under my control for as long as I choose.

For many services today, unfortunately, self-hosting is the ugly means to this desired end.

With any proprietary services, I'm unable to be me. So I use open standards.

Without self-hosting, currently, I'm unable to be me. So I self-host.

But self-hosting is not what I want to be doing, and it need not be the case. If we (as a society) were to fund and work on what's required, then everyone would be able to own the “rights” to their own services, their own addresses, their own digital identities, without self-hosting the services, just renting them (cheaply) from providers.

I think about this a lot. There are lots of pieces to the puzzle, lots of problems with the whole situation, such as data portability, privacy, funding and business models.

But the key to unraveling the whole problem is to own one's own identity. More precisely, we need to be able to run/rent/buy services that operate under an identity (domain name, usually) that we bring to them. Not an identity that the service provider controls. Bring Your Own Identity, Bring Your Own Domain. Instead of our instant message service address being some-name @ some-co and our video sharing address being some-name @ other-co and so on, we should be able to request the same identity “me @ my-domain” on every service.

Sounds ridiculous, perhaps? Multiple services at the same address — my matrix address being the same as my email address and my fediverse address? Well, I'm already doing it. It's not impossible or confusing. It's just unfamiliar. And that's because many services aren't cheaply easily available in this mode, some aren't designed to support it, and of course the big tech business model doesn't want to design their services that way because they enjoy their lock-in. And most of all, because nobody is promoting it, it's currently unnecessarily awkward for ordinary people to manage their own domain. But it's already cheap enough and one-click management would be quite straightforward to build. (Most pieces of what's needed already exist and just need putting together and declared as a standard way to do it.)

By bringing our own id to each service, then we gain the ability to switch any service to a different provider without losing continuity of our identity. (For standardised services, not proprietary ones, of course.)

I need to write more but I have been making some attempts:

When I can Bring my Own Identity, then I'm Able To Be Me

#ownDomain

Call Me By My Name -- in my dream world

Sat, 22 Jul 2023 10:01:57 +0000

You’re my uncle, sister, friend, mother, nephew or colleague. You want to message me, send me your photos and news, read my latest blog post, have a video call. Where do you go, online? You know my phone number, my email address, but just now you're not looking to call or email me.

Meet Me at the Club?

In the Dark Old Days you’d pull out your Big Tech membership cards: you might look for my updates in the Facepalm Club, try the Googol Club if it’s photos you’re sharing, or go to the Whatsitt Club to message me. But then can you recall whether I’m a fellow member in each of your clubs? And am I likely to be visiting that particular club (opening its app) today?

Comfortable though some of its members may be while eating, exercising, chatting together in their club, it’s a weak friendship that exists only there. Real friends call each other directly and meet up where we choose.

Back then, I used to maintain a membership of some of those clubs reluctantly, out of FOMO. When you called me to meet you in one of those silos, I wanted to make it easy for you, so I gritted my teeth and entered, detesting the feeling of being pushed into an environment built for advertising and surveillance and controlling what I am allowed to do. I never visited those places of my own volition.

Call Me by My Name

In my dream, you reach me online using my digital personal identifier. You know my email address is julian@foad.me.uk — well, that’s also my personal identifier. That’s all you need to know in order to reach me in other ways. No matter which app or service you are using, tell it to contact me at julian@foad.me.uk and the app will make an interactive data connection to my “digital self”, the computer system that represents me in the ether. (If you are familiar with technical protocols, think of something like a combination of DNS and WebFinger.)

Message me at julian@foad.me.uk from your favourite chat app without wondering what chat service provider I use; share your holiday photos to julian@foad.me.uk regardless whose data storage service I use on my end; read my blog at julian.foad.me.uk without some Big Tech watching and selling your activity data; make a video call to julian.foad.me.uk and only our own digital selves know about it.

The Restraining Order is Lifted

It’s as if in real life we had been living under a restraining order, we were previously limited to meeting each other only at a club or business premises, a restaurant or football match or cinema; and now the restriction is lifted and we are at last allowed to visit one another at our own homes. We no longer need those club membership cards.

Now that we are no longer required to meet only in clubs, we no longer alienate those of our friends who avoid or have difficulty going there because their other friends are banned or unwelcome. We can now associate freely with the friends who can’t in good conscience patronise those clubs: we no longer need force them to choose between our friendship and their conscience. Where we used to belong to a club that forbids our friends from bringing their young children in with them: we can meet at their own house instead. You are still free to join a club, of course, as am I, if we like spending time in there, but now I don’t have to join your club and you don't have to join my club in order for us to meet. Now we can communicate directly.

A Personal Identifier

My main personal identifier is composed from my name julian at my family domain name foad.me.uk. We can use this identifier, spelled in slightly different ways, for multiple protocols:

julian.foad.me.uk — web, bluesky, indie-auth, ...
julian@foad.me.uk — email, single-sign-on, ...
@julian@foad.me.uk — xmpp/jabber, activitypub/fediverse (mastodon, peertube, pixelfed, lemmy, ...)
@julian:foad.me.uk — matrix (IM, FUTO Circles, ThirdRoom, Commune, ...)

This is all the same “personal identifier”, in abstract, no matter that we punctuate it in different ways with “at” signs and dots and colons. (Most apps now use the x@y form.)

Multiple Personalities

This personal identifier is not the totality of my online identity. It reflects one aspect of myself. This one reflects my real name and I use it for serious real-life situations such as friends and authorities. I use other personal identifiers in other situations: my employer currently assigns me an identifier representing me in my job (mr.j.foad@my.employer), and I own a whole domain in which I can choose lots of pseudonyms that I use in playing games ({cat,dog,rat,hog,...}@pinball.wizard). From someone else’s point of view, my identifiers appear to be independent: they are not self-evidently associated with the same person. If I want to, I may reveal or prove the fact that two of my identifiers are associated.

DNS

The second part of the identifier is here assumed to be a DNS domain name. (Another time I might talk about my non-DNS identifiers, such as phone numbers and cryptographic keys.) DNS relies on registration with a central authority. I have an arrangement in place for keeping the family domain registered for the long term, so it’s not solely dependent on me renewing its registration: two or three family members share the legal responsibility for its upkeep, or a government or community organisation “underwrites” it for us.

Knowing that DNS has many associated problems — its inherentl centralisation, monetary cost, privacy and more — we certainly want to be looking ahead to using an identifier protocol that can support other systems as well. A promising one which I intend to study more is the identity component of 'atproto', an open protocol from the bluesky team.

Being Your Own Id

The key to using any such identifier, DNS or otherwise, as a basis for my own identity is that it should not be tied to and controlled by the service provider of my communication services. We must be free to change service provider while keeping our identity, bringing our own (independent) identifier away from the old service provider to the new service provider. Providers must support “Bring Your Own Id”. Our other open protocol providers, matrix and fediverse and so on, must catch up with what paid-for email providers have been offering forever. Let's see how that works.

Owning Our Own Email Address

A personal identifier in this context means one that we own personally, or at least independently of the service providers.

The domain name (after the “@”) shows who owns an email address. Some of us are using a Big Tech email address: somename@gmail.com, @hotmail.com, @msn.com, @outlook.com, etc. We are merely borrowing the use of any such address, for the limited purposes they want to allow. It is owned and controlled solely by the company that registers the domain name.

The key property of a personal identifier is that we retain the right and the ability to bring our own personal identifier to a new service provider and ask them to provide service to us using our own identifier, not one that they control.

If we use a Big Tech email address and are now wondering how we can use that as our personal identifier, how we can let our friends reach us in other ways through that same address, the plain truth is we can’t. (In theory the owning company could choose to let us use that borrowed address to identify and connect to other services, but that doesn’t match Big Tech’s business model.) That’s OK. We can work around the problem. First we need to get ourself a personally owned identifier, and start using it for everything else. Whenever we’re ready, and only once we're comfortable that's the right thing to do, then we can change our email over to our own address as well.

This article is (maybe) part of a series on how tech works in my dreams. I decided a dream is more likely to come true if I write it down. Then you might read it, and if we share the same dream, maybe together we might implement it.

Some of the names in this article are fictional. Some of the facts are fictional too, at the time of writing.

— julian@foad

#ownDomain

Own-Domain Email with Fastmail - Pros and Cons

Mon, 26 Jun 2023 20:53:51 +0000

Since going own-domain a few years ago, I chose Fastmail for email and Gandi.net for DNS, both of them for their FOSS-friendly credentials and no-nonsense decent standard-based offerings with APIs and docs etc., suitable from casual home use up to business use.

My brief assessment of Fastmail for my use case. Positives:

general reliability and speed have been great;
spam filtering is very accurate: false positives and negatives are both rare;
supporting FOSS and open standards, developing the important new JMAP standard;
filtering of incoming emails: has a nice filter editor, and uses the standard Sieve language for writing filters, but see the corresponding negative;
exceptionally good webmail client but see negatives about it;
exceptionally good config settings UI and associated docs.

Fastmail negatives:

webmail is proprietary, in a world desperately needing a decent FOSS webmail client;
webmail only stores email contact addresses in their own address book, whereas I host my own personal CardDAV/CalDAV address book and calendar elsewhere (in my Nextcloud) and use them for other things like mobile phone calls and other mobile apps — these days my contacts and calendar are not primarily for use with my email — so that doesn't work for me;
filtering emails: unfortunately Fastmail does not support the standard ManageSieve protocol which would allow managing one's mail filters from one's own email client [1];
Fastmail data take-out/independent backup [2] options are poor, I discovered recently: “install a desktop IMAP email client (such as Thunderbird) to make a local sync of your mail, and visit these various pages to download your various other data in various ways.” Ugh, yes, really.

That all said, for now I'm sticking with Fastmail for my mail hosting.

Which mail client, then? Proprietary software, and the kind of “soft lock-in” associated with it, irks me so much that I stopped using Fastmail's lovely-to-use webmail after a few years. Currently I use these freedom-software mail clients: K-9 Mail on (degoogled) mobile, and Mailspring desktop-webmail client (pretty decent, better than Roundcube/Rainloop/Snappymail), and I am also coming back after a break of several years to Thunderbird on desktop, now that it is enjoying a bit of an overhaul and a revival.

#ownDomain

[1] Sean Dague documented a very techy, fragile, hard-work, work-around. [2] I am confident Fasmail has decent backups on its own side. By “data take-out” and “independent backup” here I am referring to the ability to make myself a copy of my data, stored independently of that service provider, so that if I suddenly become unable to use the provider, due to a problem either on their side or on my side, I would have a complete backup ready to take elsewhere. Ideally this would be synchronised in “real time” so it's always up to date. One could perhaps build such a system externally, using IMAP sync software such as “vdirsyncer”, although I suspect it would work more efficiently if there were some support for it on their side.

Updated 2024-10-09: added footnote [2] explaining what I mean by “backup” there. The previous wording “backup/takeout is poor” could have been misinterpreted as doubting their own backup procedures.

My Name at My Domain

Sat, 08 Apr 2023 11:50:51 +0000

My outlook on this area of life is exemplified by the addresses I list on my “Contacts” page:

julian . foad.me.uk (my web site address)
julian @ foad.me.uk (my email address)
@julian : foad.me.uk (my matrix address)
@julian @ fed.foad.me.uk (my fediverse address) [1]

These are my addresses on different systems. See how they are all substantially the same (except for formatting and a subdomain)? They all take the form: . More importantly, see how they are all owned by myself? My addresses all belong to my domain, not to any service provider's domain.

In today's broken Internet we're told it's normal to identify ourself using addresses we don't own:

my.whole.name @ megacorpmail.com
an.other.name @ big.mastodon.instance
choose.a.name @ matrix.org

Two problems. First, what we call “our” addresses are in fact not ours at all, they are owned and controlled by the service providers. Second, we are forced to use lots of different addresses, a different one for each provider.

I call this an anti-pattern.

This practice is driven hard by commercial megacorp services, for the good old commercial reasons of lock-in and marketing. Unfortunately, and unnecessarily, it is also the common pattern on open/federated services.

What's the difference?

The owner of a domain has full control of what goes on there. In the first case, I or my family's administrator have full control over my identities at my domain. In the second case, each service provider has the control over the identities at their domain. Not only do they get to choose everything about how the account operates, data retention, banning it, charging for it, advertising on it. Also they get to choose what identifiers are registered by whom, and so in general people cannot expect to get the same my.whole.name@ prefix on every service. Some people attempt to do so, and accept the compromises when they can't.

What to do about it?

If I had grant money to spend I'd spend a good chunk making open services support bring-your-own-domain.

[1]: (I'm currently looking into Webfinger to fix the Fedi handle which is currently an outlier.)

#ownDomain

Your FOSS Project Deserves its Own Domain

Wed, 29 Mar 2023 21:09:28 +0000

Where does your project live? Where do people find it? Who controls how people access your project's resources on the Internet?

https://our-project.org/

Github the Mega-Mall

See also: Open Tech, Be Very Afraid

In practice, what do ninety-something percent of small FOSS projects do? They sign up on Microsoft Github. If we are one of these, then we feel our little project has a home on the Internet, its own address: https://github.com/our-name/our-repo. Oops, but did I say an address of its own? Well, there's the catch. I meant an address of Microsoft's own.

Github is a Gatekeeper. Every link to our project now takes the reader through a virtual gateway owned and ruled by Github's owner, Microsoft. The domain name is the gate, and its owner holds the key. Want to visit the source code? Before we reach our-name/our-repo we must walk through their gate at github.com. We must pass through whatever they put in the gateway. Ads? Nagging to sign up? Then they will let us visit the source code that we feel is “ours”.

Of course they make it appealing: if we're signed up and logged in already, we don't see the nagging, the self-advertisement to log in or sign up. But other visitors do.

Github operates on the model of free-as-in-free-beer, convenient-to-start, you-are-the-product, pay-with-your-data-and-your-attention, we-got-you-cornered, now-we-got-your-users-too.

Beyond source code...

Want to distribute the builds from your project? Github provides easy ways to automate the builds of your software using generous amounts of compute time and storage “for free”, and ways to publish the results.

Want to publish documentation? Easy. Remember, Github provides features that are convenient to start with. Github helps your users read the docs, conveniently hosted at our-project.readthedocs.io/. That's a Github domain name too. Microsoft now controls everybody's access to “our” docs. They can add things — such as adverts — and prevent us doing certain things with our docs. They can redirect readers' attention to their own business. They do this to millions of projects at once, manipulating the users of these millions of projects, all to drive their business goals.

Feeding The Corporate Interest

It's the network effect, as in social media, combined with the ease of use that comes from letting somebody else do the administration. People and small projects feel they are getting value, individually, out of this system, and in an individual and short-term sense indeed they are; but all the while being coerced into feeding the corporate interest, and all the while putting bigger obstacles in the way of other people's freedom to choose a different path.

There is no technical reason why a big company should not offer services that it provides on your own domain, so that you retain the addressability if you should decide to move to a different service provider. Services that we pay for, such as many email providers, offer bring-your-own-domain service. But the big “free” ones? They need to monetise you some other way, and they get a huge lock-in factor by putting your stuff behind the gate of their domain.

What To Do?

Get your own domain name. Host your code, docs, forums there.

You don't have to self-host it: look for a bring-your-own-domain provider for your services.

The federated music server “funkwhale” is a good example. The project's home is https://funkwhale.audio with many of its resources at subdomains like {forum,docs,dev,blog}.funkwhale.audio.

Owning the address of our project is key to owning our project.

“Millions of Free Software developers forgot why it matters to own their tools.” — ForgeFriends

Postscript: Non-DNS Naming Systems

With DNS, access to a domain is controlled some person or company who we can loosely call the “owner”. Technically that is the “registrant”, somebody who registers and pays for the domain name. The registrant (“owner”) of our-project.org has ultimate control over access to all resources under that domain name and all its subdomains.

In the near future, DNS is set to remain the dominant naming system. However, DNS is not perfect. In fact it has serious problems. You may have heard of several other systems for naming things on the Internet. A lot of work is going into these, and I am hopeful that we will see widespread use of one or more alternative naming systems. If you are involved with any of those, you might want to consider how we can apply the principle that people and projects deserve to own their own name space.

More: #awesomeFOSS #selfHosted #GiveUpGithub #DitchDiscord #ownDomain #FreedomTech #useOpenTools

Use Your Own Domain

Tue, 29 Nov 2022 10:18:18 +0000

Getting an official fediverse account for your organisation? Name it at your own existing domain: @ news @ our.example.org.

Avoid the temptation to skimp on initial effort. Don't register a user account at some public fediverse hosting instance: @ our-example-org @ a.public.site. That's lame. It's also suspicious and untrustworthy, like if a company emails you from a gmail address, because anyone can create accounts on public instances with your name in them.

Own your own identity: use your own domain name.

(You can still outsource the hosting and administration of the server.)