starting with endings

limited selections available, but with a distinctive enough name we might get lucky

(suggestions of course welcome)

• can be or get extremely pricey, high risk of surge in cost when it comes time to renew registration
• rego costs for almost all of them go to big soulless speculators, flagrant leeching off grassroots groups, etc etc
• appear to be the norm among community-run servers (at least the ones i tend to bump into) so eschewing could come across strangely

(r.i.p. my early thought, (((i)just)wanna)pr.asia)

could be a great, mutually beneficial scheme in theory but

• rego money’s diverted from their countries to private interests abroad anyway
• used so heavily by spammers that often emails from such addresses are automatically blocked; not so great if we wanted to, say, send out account-related notices by email

• can be pretty affordable, though depends
• some impose moralising restrictions on use that would be incompatible with, like, being much use to us?
• resulting addresses: tacky and/or confusing?

hm… does spelling “space” s.p.a.s.e. have any undesirable connotations?

working title snailspace
snailspa?

• international as
• despite the attempted takeover a few years ago, this is one of the T.L.Ds most likely to remain out of total corporate control
• easy to transfer whose name a domain is registered in
• i kind of like that you could pretend it's short for a verb form

even if not so many of them are all that place-based anymore…

• these are more (overtly) susceptible to the whim of regional bodies and state interests
• or are obscure like the antarctic one run by one dude no-one could get in touch with for a while there¹
• a handful are still managed by vaguely or ostensibly public-interesty bodies, as in the cases of .se and .asia² (significant emphasis might be called for on ostensibly, but at least they aren't literally straight-up google or amazon or one suchamegacorp wannabe or …)
• there are sometimes extra demands. snaffling "snailspa.se" for instance is dependent on embrace by a nation state - requiring a business or person number. and like, well as a freelancer i have a business number, which would count, but why should this project be tied to what is sort of in some ways a formal dedication to personal profit³ (and what if i decide to close my soletradership?) and/but while it's not super clear what swedish law as applied to internetstiftelsen considers equivalent to a personnummer or whatever (passport? birth certificate? driver's licence? public health card?), why should this project be that beholden to an individual and why should it be subject to someone involved being recognised as a subject somewhere (and disclosing sensitive info to a registrar company and their data handlers and a domain name authority and so forth)? .se registration can be transferred, even so… though only to another residency-ticket–holder or biz-like construct

• and indeed a biz-like construct could be used
• and would be needed for these endings
• considering i'm slightly little-red-henning it⁴ at this stage, i think establishing a co-op or nfp or anything is too big a hurdle for now (especially for something that could well fizzle out within weeks—who knows if anybody will enjoy any of the ~​space​~ in practice, yet?)
• even if we start with something else, we could assume a more formal structure if people want to down the track (whether a la social.coop or very differently)

• are we dissatisified? shall we consider something i have neglected?

anyway i've registered "snailhuddle.org" for the time being, if only so we can link people-who-might-be-interested-in-joining-in to somewhere that's not tumblr for catching up on ideas and the state of things. (posts to come re: actually putting anything on there. bb steps. will be getting there.)

a gathering of @@@@@@s
working title snailspace