Setting up a free *.city.state.us locality domain
28 points by ar-nelson
28 points by ar-nelson
If you have no qualms with sharing your city/state location, this seems like a great way to create an ATProto vanity domain or a single-user Fediverse instance.
I did this a while ago! @finn.seattle.wa.us (I never post so don’t bother following me)
I also operate a fediverse instance on https://social.seattle.wa.us
Are there other countries that offer something similar to their citizens?
Some locality delegated managers do not seem to respond to requests for new registrations anymore. For example, beltane.com appears 487 times on the list of localities and their current webpage appears to be a domain parking page.
You may have to find out who previously owned beltane.com. And even then, they might not know anything about .us domain registrations.
The list is an archive.org snapshot from 2009. Checking the WHOIS of the locality domain might give more up-to-date info.
This sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole
It seems the beltane.com website was hacked in 2019, returned in 2020, broke in 2024, before finally resting at today's splash page.
…but https://domains.beltane.com/ still exists as a GoDaddy reseller + beltane.com has MX records pointing at Microsoft.
…and EIELSON-AFB.AK.US (the first zone listed on delegated_subdomains.txt) is still listed by whois.nic.us with Registrant Organization: Beltane Web Services.
usdns.beltane.com (and usdns2.beltane.com through usdns5.beltane.com) all respond to queries too.
Maybe we should both try to email us-domain@beltane.com? Perhaps they're still just in the middle of a new redesign :)
What about cloudflare? I use them for DNS and they're free but I'm not sure that they do the local thing
Oh interesting! A while ago, I noticed a personal web site under .minneapolis.mn.us…. And did some digging and found a total of one other site under therr (that wasn’t government or official). But I couldn’t figure out how they got the domains.
Imagine if your local public library could run DNS servers and static file hosting to put under such a domain.