ccTLDs are bad for your project
Country-code top level domains (ccTLDs) were intended to provide domains for countries, as the name implies. But they aren’t always used for that. Sometimes they’re used as auxiliary domains: Twitter used t.co and LinkedIn used lnkd.in for shortened links in posts. Sometimes they indicate some kind of affinity: many tech websites use .io or .sh. Sometimes they’re used for humor: the queer.af Mastodon server was presumably queer as fuck. So as you figure out the best domain name for your project, should you use a ccTLD? Absolutely not!
Why? Well, the queer.af domain was shut down by the Taliban. .io should be discontinued. Tokelau’s .tk TLD became a haven for cybercriminals. Do you want to put your project’s domain in the hands of geopolitics? Or participate in what some have called digital colonialism?
With the expansion of the generic top-level domain space in 2014, there’s even less reason to use a ccTLD for your project. It’s why this site is duckalignment.academy instead of duckalignmentacade.my (not to mention the fact that my representation of Malaysia at a Model UN conference in 1999 is probably not sufficient to convince Malaysia’s registrar to give it to me).
But what if it’s too late and you’re already using a ccTLD? You probably don’t want to make a hard cutover tomorrow. This will result in a lot of broken links. If your project hosts infrastructure (like a package repository) or provides a service to users, it will result in broken applications. Using a ccTLD poses a risk that you need to manage. (See chapter 1 of Program Management for Open Source Projects for more on risk management.)
At a minimum, you should have a plan for what to do if your domain becomes unusable. But because the disruption can come quickly and take a while to fully resolve, it’s probably best if you secure a new domain now and start taking steps to migrate.
This post’s featured photo by Christian Lue on Unsplash.
