TLD: .com or .org or what?

Codidact Platform Ideas
22

Your reasoning is wrong then, these already have well-defined meanings since 40 years back. Com means commercial, period.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains

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23

Though originally intended for use by for-profit business entities, for a number of reasons it became the “main” TLD for domain names and is currently used by all types of entities including nonprofits, schools, and private individuals.

I fail to see the problem with using .com.

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24

ICANN isn’t going to drop in and say “hey folks, your domain name is wrong so there” if we use it to mean community. It’s more convenient for us, so that’s what we went with.

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25

But it’s not how you use it, it’s about how the world uses these long-standing names.

I’m not arguing whether we should use .com or .org, or some combination of those for various parts. Use .com if you want, but please stop claiming .com is for “community”. It’s not. That’s just plain wrong.

26

Note that here on the forum, we are also a community, despite the .org in the name.

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27

When we had the domain name discussion for Codidact, there was the argument, that .COM-domains are more common than .ORG-domains. That people would use codidact.com in favor of codidact.org if they are not 100%-ly sure. We want our primary instance to be as findable as possible. Hence, we decided, that we use codidact.com for the site and codidact.org for the software (as long as we don’t vote for a different site name).

However, there’s also reasonable doubt between a non-profit team/organization (orga TBD) and a .COM domain. Therefore I started claiming, that for us the .COM stands for community. This is meant as a way to prevent doubts around (not-)for-profit institutions hosting the primary Codidact instance. I think it is a good metaphor, despite being not 100%-ly semantically correct.

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28

That’s true. The reason for that is, that this forum is more about the technical implementation and our team (the organization), rather than a Codidact community (within an instance).

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29

I agreed at the time, and still agree, with the division for us of .org vs. .com.

For the purists out there, I need only point out the numerous United States Government sites that use a .com TLD because that’s what everyone expects. To those of us in the web development world it may not make sense - you don’t “store an integer as a string because everything is strings” (well, in some languages you do…) - you use the right tool for the job. But because of the overwhelming perceived “.com-ness” of the internet-as-a-whole, .com is the go-to TLD for most organizations - whether for-profit, not-for-profit, educational (there is some traction for .edu, but less than you might expect) or government (e.g., usps.com). That has significantly cut into the otherwise expected (by investors…) attraction of new industry-specific TLDs. For many years, the average non-geek has been trained that “every web site starts with www. and ends with .com”.

We are fortunate that we were able to get a fairly short, easy to spell domain name in both .com and .org.

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