Nonprofit pitches .self, a free TLD built from scratch for self-hosting

The Human-Centered Computing Foundation (HCCF), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, is campaigning for a new top-level domain called .self, aimed squarely at people who want to run their own internet services. The group has been approved into ICANN’s Applicant Support Program, the subsidy track for applicants who can’t afford the steep cost of a new TLD, and frames the effort as a reaction to an internet whose infrastructure is tuned to harvest data and monetize attention. The pitch is to operate .self as a public good that makes data ownership the default rather than a luxury.

The proposed mechanics center on giving every person a free subdomain, one per individual, with rules against parking, squatting, and reselling. HCCF wants to pair the namespace with shared operational plumbing that self-hosters usually struggle with on their own: VPN tunnels so machines behind NAT or without a public IP can still be reached, and a trusted mail server to sidestep the deliverability problems that plague home email. It also promises open-source client software covering those mail and VPN services, automated TLS certificate issuance, dynamic DNS, and a caching local DNS resolver, with policies and restrictions set through community governance.

For now this is a vision document, not a working system, and notably the entire proposal lives in a downloadable PDF rather than on the web page itself, which drew pointed criticism from readers given the organization’s human-centered branding. More substantive skepticism centered on the gaps: who funds it, how one-person-one-domain gets verified, whether self-hosting is actually mandatory or external hosting is allowed, and what .self really delivers over existing free options like duckdns or cheap personal TLDs such as .me. Bundling a stack of open-source clients under a single TLD is a large undertaking, and commenters worried the project could stall even if ICANN grants the domain.