StaRSS

For you trekkies out there

As somebody who runs Ubiquity UniFi gear, it’s all flash and very little substance. Its dashboard will dazzle you with charts that either aren’t accurate, aren’t meaningful, or are generally unhelpful. It has a “new” (half a decade old now) and classic interface you can choose between, but neither interface gives you access to every setting you’ll need. I still to this day find myself swapping between them.

If you just need basic devices to make packets go, they do the job. But an average day in the life of a UniFi-enjoyer consists of things like trying to troubleshoot some kind of network issue only to find that the data collected by the devices doesn’t mathematically make sense, so you go to the UniFi forums just to find out it’s a bug that’s existed for years and has never been resolved. And on days like that, I find myself wishing I had something less flashy that would just allow me to see what’s going on with my network, accurately.

Normies

I’m not sure what the logical outcome of this escalating arms race of enshittification will be, but as a career Sysadmin I’ve been able to avoid a LOT of this bullshit through self hosting, which is something a (Non-tech nerd) layman isn’t going to bother with, for as long as existing products (and their subscriptions) are still within “tolerable” levels.

But the thing is, a lot of the convenience with computing devices today didn’t exist in the 90’s, when it was more common for young normies to have what would be considered above average computer technical skills today.

When the entire market turns into inescapable subscriptions, the market for a non-technical friendly appliance box, like Synology came close to doing, shows up to corner the market on hardware you can own and run your own shit on with minimal headaches and no subscriptions.

I should clarify that what I’m asking is what you think the benefit would be. Since you don’t have an answer to the question I will give it to you: There would be no benefit. There already exists dozens of gTLDs to migrate to, they don’t need another specific one.

I don’t think they really need a standardized place to move to. The natural gTLD for them to move to today would be .tech, but it could be anything. Nothing wrong with good old .com. Every one of these companies undoubtedly already own at least a dozen versions of their domains on all the most popular gTLDs. The time scale of moving would also be 5-10 years. Thats plenty of time to move your domain, have a redirect on the old domain, and people to get used to the new domain.

…why? For what purpose and how would that help at all?

The coexistence of .gb and .uk is only because .uk predates the rule by a few months. You could say it was grandfathered in, though they are both reserved in ISO 3166-1. This one isn’t a good example of something that can happen decades after the rule was put in place.

As for .eu it isn’t really an exception, .eu is reserved in ISO 3166-1.

How would IANA changing one TLD into a different TLD and then everyone using the old TLD migrating everything to the new TLD be any easier than everyone just migrating everything to a new TLD?

In either case there wouldn’t be anything “in unison” about it.

Yes I have. ccTLDs are 2 characters, as I specified above. To make .io into a gTLD you’d need to add a third character, which wouldn’t do anything to help the companies who are using .io today.

The companies who are using .io who aren’t associated with the Indian Ocean Territories will however have 5 years (or 10 if an extension is requested) to migrate to a gTLD before .io is retired.

gTLDs are 3 characters or more (.com .net .org ). 2 characters TLDs are reserved for ccTLDs. This allows a CLEAR separation between gTLDs and ccTLDs, so that precisely what’s happening with the .io ccTLD doesn’t happen on accident.

The reason is because ccTLDs need to match the alpha-2 code of the country as it exists in ISO 3166-1. This is because IANA doesn’t want to be the arbiter of which countries exist or not. You get a code, you get a ccTLD. No code, no ccTLD.

.su exists in spite of the policy of IANA, not because of them. The popularity of a ccTLD has no relevance to its continued existence.

ITT: People who think this won’t happen because they don’t understand the first thing about IANA, ICANN, their policies, ccTLDs, or the history of this kind of thing happening before. While ICANN has the authority to allow the .io domain to continue to exist, it would be a complete reversal on their newly established policy for retiring ccTLDs, which was primarily motivated by being burned on this exact type of thing happening before.

A good example is the .yu ccTLD which after a long back and forth was finally retired in 2010.

That is most definitely exactly exactly how it works.

That is not what will happen. 2 letter TLDs are reserved for ccTLDs.

Yes, that is how the ccTLD is enforced by IANA.. And it is in fact an automatic process. There is a policy for requesting a single 5 year extension, but that extension request must be accompanied by a retirement plan, otherwise by policy the ccTLD has a 5 year grace period before being removed.

They will not retire a domain under heavy use such as .io.

Heavy use has not stopped them from attempting to retire other ccTLDs, it just delays the process.

That is how it works.

The current ccTLDs that have outlived their countries still exist because the retirement policy wasn’t finalized until 2022 and in all cases, ICANN has been moving towards retiring them.

You gave .su as an example for IANA not retiring ccTLDs, but the .su debacle is one of the major motivators behind their policy of retiring all ineligible ccTLDs.

ICANN could allow the .io domain to live on, but doing so would be a complete 180 from their current policy.

Multiple instances are confusing because they matter a whole hell of a lot, and understanding exactly how instances federate things to each other is absolutely crucial to having a good experience on the fediverse.

Anyone who thinks it’s simple or doesn’t matter, or makes that annoying comparison to email really just don’t understand how the fediverse actually works.

The layout is like, the most important part of material design.