Moving freepost to a new domain
10 votes c/freepost Posted by zPlus — 10 votes, 9 commentsSource

In about a month the domain freepo.st will expire. I will not renew it. Instead, I invite everybody to use the domain https://freepost.peers.community.

After the domain has expired, it will enter a 40 days “grace renew” period followed by a 30 days “redemption” period during which I will have no control over the domain, and the registry can use it at their own will (eg. sell it or display their own content). After that it should get deleted completely.

is there any reason for that? I like the domain. sad to see some ads porn gambling ads under that one. If it is a money issue I am willing to help out.

Yes it’s exclusively a money problem.

There is a longer answer though. There is another community project that I’d like to build, which is that of a “community fund”, that is a community-ran budget that can be shared and used for supporting free software and free culture projects. This means both community projects directly, but also others projects and developers as well. I’ve wanted to do this for so long, and the only reason why I’m not there yet is only because I need help with the legal aspects of setting it up and running it; but so far, I haven’t found this help yet. Now, the domain is not prohibitively expensive, but it costs quite a lot nonetheless. I pay for it €40/year. So I’m trying to save every penny that I can to put into the other project (the community fund). It makes me too a bit nostalgic to let the domain go, but it’s a case a choosing priorities and I prefer to use the money for trying to start the community fund rather than paying for a “vanity domain” (nice trivia: I also used to pay for fpo.st but I let that go a long time ago).

I very, very welcome your help! However, if you like me think that supporting a community fund would be more important than a domain, I’m kindly asking you to save your money and help us later when we will be able to launch the fund :)
Maybe the freepo.st domain can be repurchased in the future, I don’t think many people can have an interest in it, except for domain squatters maybe.

I like the domain and find it useful for this place. I am willing to pay for the next two years if you like that.

Thank you a lot! Was it you on IRC yesterday? Unfortunately I was afk when you joined :(
If you can join again we can talk about it, or perhaps you can pm me your email address and I’ll write you there? Alternatively you can write to me at zplus@peers.community.

Sorry for the difficulties that you encountered while joining the channel, but I had to restrict access because there was a huge wave of spam going on at freenode. I know somebody setup a #peers bridge(?) on Matrix but I don’t use Matrix myself so I don’t really know how or if that works properly.

I think it is almost impossible to repurchase once-lapsed domains later, as domain squatters will almost always grab expired domains and hold on to them for surprisingly long time periods (some domains I have not renewed years ago are still owned by squatters who are still trying to sell them back to me from time to time; even though they are not common terms or anything).

I like freepo.st too and would be willing to help in paying for the domain - this doesn’t mean I won’t help with supporting a “community fund” later on. :)

wow thank you so much!! I was certainly not expecting all this support!

I don’t have a way for collecting donations (another reason why a community fund would be useful!), so maybe I should discuss this with Peter first then eventually ping you here again. Does it sound good?

Yeah, sure, feel free to get in touch if you need any support.

I think it is almost impossible to repurchase once-lapsed domains later, as domain squatters will almost always grab expired domains and hold on to them for surprisingly long time periods

You are right, this is a real problem, and of course it happened to me as well. On one instance it was the registrar itself who squatted my domain! And they used my WHOIS records to renew the domain too! When I formally protested to ICANN, the domain was set to some “locked” or “transfer prohibited” mode that required the collaboration of the registrar for unlocking it, so there was nothing I could do. It was such a nightmare. That happened more or less 10 years ago. As of today, they still squat the domain but with their own WHOIS records so I don’t really care about that domain anymore.

On the other hand, fpo.st is squatters-free so maybe no squatters would be interested on freepo.st as well.

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