.furry - A Top-Level Domain for furries
108 points by Aks
108 points by Aks
At the end of the day, the intersection between furries and computer people is remarkably large, so I have no doubts this will end up funded and we're about to see a lot of new vanity furry pages. Good on them.
There is a similar project for .meow (for which the funding has ended).
Indeed, we're aware of the similarities; as far as I can tell, we each came up with the idea independently. We've been in contact a few times over the last 6 months as they applied to the ASP, and wish them the best of luck with their fundraising campaign and application.
Similar-enough that I'm actually side-eye-ing this one just a little bit, in spite of it being something that I'd normally be all-in to support.
This is only tangentially related but…
Back in late 80’s through the 90’s there was a ton of anthropomorphic animal art in the Amiga scene: Eric Schwartz’s Amy the Squirrel would regularly be featured on the cover of Amiga Format and there would be short animations distributed on cover disks and on Aminet, etc.
I’m not in the furry community and back then I didn’t even know such a thing existed. I just lived my life assuming that was “the Amiga animation style” or whatever, since it was so prominent.
Anyway after I got older and knew more about the world I was like “ohhhhhh, that makes so much more sense now.”
The mentioned ICANN Application Support Program "intended to make applying for a new gTLD or operating a registry more accessible to applicants who would be otherwise unable due to financial and resource constraints".
without this, 250k usd to set up a TLD. I wonder what justifies the cost.
The fact that ICANN has a monopoly on TLDs.
And (for practical purposes) TLDs are a scarce resource, you probably don't want too many of them, so the fact that so many gTLDs exist anyway suggests that the market is willing to stomach $250k a pop.
I don't understand why you'd want fewer of them? I want better gTLDs! Ideally without ICANN monopolizing the process, but still. We get .zip which is just horrendous from a security standpoint, but community groups of useful folks proposing reasonable gTLDs still have to come up with a quarter-million United States Freedombucks to apply?
.zip is no worse than .com or .pl or .sh
Regarding ICANN’s monopoly, a global shared namespace has to have some kind of central organization to manage it. (And though the crypto bros want to implement that organization in code and pretend it doesn’t exist, they are deluding themselves.) When thinking about how a rootless graph naming system might work, I came to the conclusion that it would probably grow something like the root cert programmes, but for TLDs instead of x.509, with something like the CA/Browser forum to co-ordinate them. Whether that forum would be better or worse than ICANN is imponderable…
Just to be clear on the .zip gTLD security issue, it's been documented extensively.
Having a central agency does have advantages, and your points stand well. I still dislike the way ICANN has managed the process with regard to pricing and democratization, and they're the only game in town, which is bothersome to me. I do not have an alternative to replace it with, though.
.zip is far worse because it creates confusion with the .zip extension for end users
I think @fanf was saying that .COM (1), .pl (Perl), and .sh (shell script) are also file extensions, though I'd argue that .zip is the most common of the file extensions that overlap TLDs.
I guess so, but .sh and the such already require computer knowledge to the point you are less susceptible to confusing them unlike .zip which is an extremely common file extension
It's defined in the individual Registry-Registrar Agreements, but the registrar (TLD) earns a "wholesale fee" of $1-10 per domain registered by each registrar (the customer-facing company, like DNSimple, GoDaddy, etc.). I did a quick search and didn't turn up a draft for .furry, but I'd guess from the community vibes that they want to be on the low end. The back of the envelope calculation is the setup fees amortized by the expected wholesale fees; their costs will be marketing and fees to a Registry Service Provider (keeps the registry db online; I worked at one of these ages ago).
Who gets to own a a top level domain? I mean would this give this organization the right to charge anyone for that TLD?
.furry wants to be a generic top-level domain (gTLD). Those are overseen by ICANN, which has an application process that organizations work through to demonstrate that they have some reasonable expectation of use and can plausibly meet the technical requirements. You can read about this ASP program in detail for a good idea of what that looks like.
ICANN occasionally opens up applications to run new TLDs; applications are open right now https://www.new-tld.com/
There are a bunch of financial, legal, and technical requirements that I won’t get in to. The organization that is granted the TLD can keep it private or can lease 2LDs through ICANN’s accredited DNS registrars.
The usual reason for wanting a TLD is to collect 2LD rents. The previous new TLD programme was very large and many of them were not financially successful. There were a lot of unrealistic expectations about how desirable domain names in new TLDs would be, and even many years later most people aren’t aware there are hundreds and hundreds of them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains
I had the great pleasure of visiting Pawprint Prototyping last year. The scope and execution of their physical space is phenomenal, and I treasured the one evening I got to spend there; their efforts have directly inspired me and mine in my local furry community to pursue similar (though less insanely ambitious) community building goals.
If you're ever in the city of san jose, I would encourage anyone to reach out for a visit and see what it's like when a small queer community builds a space for themselves from the ground up. Of all the many gags and in jokes written (sometimes literally) into the walls of the space, I think my favorite is still "large cartoon straws, for cartoons [read: fursuits]".
With that experience in mind this endeavor is wholly unsurprising and I will totally support them. https://nocoffei.com is decidedly un-furry, but nocoffei.furry would be a fantastic alternate domain for my fluffier side :3
I've always been genuinely curious about why there are so many Furries in the tech world, but too afraid to ask for fear of causing some unintended offense. The ones I have met (out of suit) have usually been pretty vibrant and intelligent people, whereas I find tech to be immensly soul-crushing, but perhaps I'm in the wrong arm of it.
i'd be interested in a more formal study but here are some hot takes, using furry as a loose synonym for queer:
Reading @soatok ‘s posts on furry fandom might be informative:
https://soatok.blog/category/furry-fandom/
It was for me. Especially this one:
https://soatok.blog/2021/06/02/why-furries-make-excellent-hackers/
Reminder that Anthrocon is coming up in a few weeks, one of the largest furry gatherings on the planet and also a hive of tech workers and indie hackers. Might be a good time to solicit donations.
Awoo!
I'm personally waiting for .scalie or .lizard
Will this start a trend towards hyperspecific community TLDs? Will ICANN have to start seriously considering the social and political implications of some TLD? I'm sure they do already given TLDs such as .spreadbetting, but I don't think I've seen a group/community focused TLD like this before. I can imagine a future TLD request being rejected and such a group taking ICANN to U.S. court for violating their free speech or civil liberties or whatever... Interesting development
Will this start a trend towards hyperspecific community TLDs?
That trend started ages ago, eg. .army, .moe, .rugby, .plumbing all are very specific.
Will ICANN have to start seriously considering the social and political implications of some TLD?
I believe ICANN cares about filling its budget first and foremost.
We already have .mormon and .poker, among many others. I don't see why this particular community is an escalation in specificity.
I'm not opposed to it, I hate DNS and hope the very idea of TLDs goes away in the future. I just think there's something different to a community, like furries, than there is to what I thought pretty much all TLDs are, businesses and such - but .mormon makes the case that this isn't an escalation so I guess it's fine.
What would you want to use instead of DNS?
DNS as type of protocol is irreplaceable. DNS as root zones as diktated by IANA/ICANN have some projects that want to change the landscape:
https://handshake.org/ https://ens.domains/ https://unstoppabledomains.com/
There is no real problem with hyper-specific TLDs - the more the merrier. I say this as someone who runs his blog from a .horse domain despite having no interest in horses, I just thought it was amusing.
You gotta try to set up a Bad Horse traceroute/rDNS thing.
Oh, I tried to get a funny .horse domain like bad.horse, dead.horse, stalking.horse, etc. Although the .horse TLD had only been open a week or two all the good domains were taken, mostly by squatters. I am happy with what I ended up with (unique enough to get a reaction) though.
It’s going to be interesting to see what funny domains come from the .furry TLD.
Is this related to the complaints about .gay I see on Wikipedia?
My understanding is that .meow is, but this one is unrelated.
Indeed, it's connected but not the main reason we started .meow. FWIW, most of our objections to .gay would be resolved if GoDaddy followed up with their commitment to donate a percentage (I forget how much) of the proceeds of .gay to LGBT charities.
The primary reason .meow came about was that a friend and I were commiserating over the lack of queer bars in Gent after our regular shut down due to not being sustainable. We decided that we wanted to do something to fund culture rather than just activism and survival, and a TLD was something that was within our capabilities and would be just profitable enough to be worth it.
I remember when you couldn’t even get a .com.au without seventeen forms of identification and the indenture of your first born.
Can someone explain to me why a community would want a TLD rather than a website (and perhaps one with a directory of other sites?
Because it's fun and allows self expression.
Also because furries are "a community" only in the loosest sense. There is no centralized organization that are "the furries", it's anyone who likes anthropomorphized animals (hell, people don't even necessarily agree on that much...) and identifies as such. It'd be like asking "why isn't there a single website for plumbers?" It just doesn't make sense.
I understand that the "community" of furries is only very loosely organized. But I do not understand why having a top-level domain is better for a group that shares a common interest. One could use a website because it was fun and allowed self-expression, or one could have a top level domain that was fun and allowed self-expression. Why is one of these better than the other? (The website is cheaper and simpler, so that's a win if there's no argument on the other side.)
A TLD allows for emancipation.
You do not want a single website to control what is okay to publish or talk about.
For instance, whether adult art is allowed or not; the “level of furriness” of the content (human bodies with animal features vs. animal bodies with human features); whether purely human content is banned; whether only one quadrant of the political compass is allowed or not.
Decentralization is important.
Why would companies and organizations want TLDs (.com, .net, .org, etc.) rather than a website?
They don't!
Apple is found at "https://www.apple.com/" not "https://www.apple". Google uses Greenland's ".gl" domain for their URL shortener, but all their regular properties are found at URLs like ".com" or ".co.uk".
To be fair google does make relatively common use of their .google TLD e.g. https://blog.google
Well, they kind of do...? At least a lot of them think they do: accenture, aeg, airbus, alibaba, amazon, americanexpress, azure
Huh! I didn't realize they had been doing that. I don't remember seeing these kinds of TLDs in the wild.
Well, today I learned something new! Thank you.
Probably my “favourite” real-world example of this is https://status.uk.barclays/, which Barclays regularly point their UK retail banking customers towards for ATM / online banking service status.
(albeit they “just” use their .co.uk for most of their web estate)
Adjacently, a few of my vulpine furry friends have been disappointed they can’t register a domain under https://icannwiki.org/.fox
LOL -- I love the idea of using .fox for this purpose and now I really wish it were possible.
The apt comparison is with subdomains. You could register furry.com, if it was available, and allow people to register subdomains.
This is different to a website; with a furry.com website, I can't really allow others to publish stuff independently, with subdomains I can.
So that does the TLD give you?
Well, all TLDs are run by someone who says what is acceptable and what is not acceptable. For example, the .cat TLD is meant for Catalan stuff, but right now they allow basically anything, including cat (feline) related stuff. But tomorrow they could decide to change the rules and expel anyone who does not comply, leading to massive headaches.
With a TLD there's somewhat more control. Still, ICANN oversees the TLDs and I guess they could destroy one if they wanted, but there's not so much precedent there. However, there have been ICANN controversies, there's why some people advocate for alternate root domains. (For example, https://opennic.org/.)
Not sure I understood you correctly but you can run a domain service on a second-level domain just fine. ".co.uk" is an eTLD and so is "pages.gay" and "github.io" and so on...
Yes, this is what I meant by:
The apt comparison is with subdomains. You could register furry.com, if it was available, and allow people to register subdomains.
Still, *.furry domains will always be shorter than, say *.fur.co. And as a TLD, you will not be subject to the whims of a third-party-managed TLD and ICANN, only to the whims of ICANN. (And IMHO, ICANN has fewer reasons to have whims, and more incentives to not stir things up. Surely people can bring up instances of ICANN misbehaving, of course.)
A bit off-topic, but I have to mention this. Always be careful on the TLD you choose for your domain. Do not use ccTLDs for puns, etc. only use them if your domain is truly associated to the country in question.
I'm not in the USA so maybe I'm not super up to date on this suff. Do people in your workplaces wear these costumes?
(I'm also not in the USA)
I typically only wear my fursuit to the office summer party + halloween, but use furry art / photos of me in fursuit as my avatar on work tools. Similar with my other furry colleagues.
https://lobi.to/writes/thewolfcostume/ has some thoughts I wrote up on this a few years ago.
Not in USA, have not worn one at a workplace. First off, I can barely see anything from mine.. :D And its incredibly toasty inside.
But if there was a party, sure!
Here's what mine looks like: https://akselmo.dev/assets/images/cosplay2024/matsucon/matsucon_7.jpg
I don't want to speak for the entire community, but I'm pretty sure it would be pretty impractical to wear one while you work :v
I don't have a fursuit, but if I had one I'd probably only really wear it sporadically… from what I've heard it can get pretty hot inside, and I can't imagine typing on a keyboard with giant fluffy paws on LOL
From what I've seen on Fedi people only tend to wear them to take photos or go to events.
(Also furries don't only exist in the US!)
I haven't seen it and I've been in tech for over 20 years
(That said, coworkers do wear them to social events after hours)
