Today’s web needs more .org sites. I’m changing this site’s extension to thanosapollo.org from .com.

About

I’ve first registered this site using thanosapollo.com, .com is the default when it comes to today’s websites, roughly 50% of websites use it and that’s what most users are familiar with.

.com stands for commercial/for profit, although it’s sometimes also used by blogs and nonprofit sites to capture more visitors. On the other hand, .org is associated with nonprofit organizations, or that generally provide free information and resources.

The context of this post refers to .org not just as a top level domain, but as a freely accessible FOSS site.

Why switch to .org and why we need more .org sites

I’m not planning to use this site for any kind of commercial/for profit purpose, having a .org extension implies that this site purpose is non-commercial. Even though it’s less popular, I find that today’s web landscape needs more .org sites and less .com.

About ~10 years ago, when I was 13 years old, the web seemed to be a sanctuary of freely available information. 10 years later, even useless information is behind a javascript pay-wall or login portal. The web’s increased traffic has been followed with lesser valuable content creation, with today’s users being accustomed to using the ‘web’ only through mobile social media apps, making them tied to a proprietary ecosystem where they don’t even own their profiles on said platforms, their webmaster does.

We need more sites that offer free information for all and less people behind proprietary platforms. I hope in the future we have more people actually owning the sites they share their content. They might make blogs or whatever else they like, as long as less of them end up at the mercy of big tech .com companies.

Even if you are after creating only for-profit content, making your business depend entirely on a 3rd party is not the brightest idea.

Difficulties of changing my site to .org

The only issue with changing my site’s extension was updating my project’s git remotes & package recipes as well email services to the new domain name. Although this is more of an inconvenience rather than an actual difficulty.