Which TLDs are too risky for hosting?

Basically any 2-letter TLD should be avoided unless you live in that country.
If you want to be clever, use subdomains and pick one of the new TLDs. For instance, ban.anal.ink, is like $5.
- Banana link or ban anal ink?
  
  As the admin of lemmy.inbutts.lol I would have thought my position on that subject would be clear.
  
  I can see why anal ink could be controversial.
- You could also choose a 5-10 digit .xyz domain, those cost $€0.85
  
  Except for the only one I'd want:
  
  The first year. Then it's likely $12/year.
- Just to add another concrete example, I saw a toot recently that .af may be risky, as some countries are beginning to implement embargoes; the person who had a domain there may be losing it soon

A big one is the .nu domain, which is extremely popular in Sweden (since "nu" means "now" in Swedish).
It's currently controlled by the same large non-profit that controls .se (Internet Foundation in Sweden, IIS), but Niue has been wanting control of it for decades. It's a complicated issue since .nu addresses have become incredibly important to Swedish Internet infrastructure.
Litigation was launched in 2020 but I'm not aware of any news since then.
- Who is Niue?
  
  Niue is a small Polynesian island country north-east of New Zeeland. It's who the domain was originally assigned to.
- since "nu" means "now" in Swedish
  Same for Dutch

familyphotos.zip
- mysupersafe.app
- Monthlyreportsv2.zip

Some TLDs that aren't country codes but also aren't very useful or popular will sometimes be blanket blocked by institutions, on the theory that there's so many more garbage malware C&Cs or whatever than actual useful sites that it makes sense to ban the whole thing. So you might not want to go with .bingo or .rest or anything with no perceivable use.
- Like zip or mov. Don't buy those. Any smart person and corporation already has those blanket banned.
  
  Can I interest you in my new Lemmy instance, blanket-banned.zip?

If you're hosting an instance on a risky TLD and you wanna migrate, probably best to close signups now and disallow any new communities from being created on there

.cx
Found out the hard way when my gerbiling instance, lemmy.cx, was rejected.
- gerbiling?
- Gostse was hosted on this domain.

.biz always seemed a bit sketchy. Would probably also avoid .nk
- The TLD for the DPRK is .kp, not .nk

On an unrelated note, who is sitting on lemmy.games? We need a gaming dedicated instance. I got lemmygames.net but lemmy.games would make me happy.
- Personally I would prefer if we didn't use "Lemmy" for everything. I really like programming.dev as a software development based instances. Also makes it less confusing if an instance decides to change to kbin or a future compatible server.

.fan.
But seriously...
After spending all week installing Lemmy and trying to make it happy, I was losing my mind. I've finally got everything but pics working. I plan on troubleshooting it this weekend.
I'm being sarcastic, kind of. I wasn't sure if I was going to stay a Lemmy fan amidst the painful set up - even with Docker compose and following all of the instructions, I was struggling to self-host it.
I am still a Lemmy fan and I understand that I should do less complaining and more contributing, so I am going to write up my experience getting it running once I get the pictrs stuff working. I love the federation and want to help it thrive.
- What did you install it on and with instructions did you use? I installed it on my Synology NAS, which took about 30 minutes using this guide. I was honestly impressed with how easy it was to install. https://mariushosting.com/how-to-install-lemmy-on-your-synology-nas/
  
  Funny that you say that: my first problem was of my own making - I was using arm64 hardware and Lemmy doesn't quite support that architecture yet, so I ended up getting a Synology myself this week. It's awaiting disks and then I plan on moving Lemmy to that box.
  Thanks for sharing that site - I'll make good use of it once the drives get here.
  The instructions worked out, but the troubleshooting steps need to be fleshed out more. Again, probably my issues, like DNS. I learned a lot though.
- This https://lemmy.world/post/1978767 was just posted a couple hours ago. It doesn't seem to cover what you're having trouble with, but it might be a good place to put what you've learned if they're open to contributions.
  
  Thanks boss, I'll check that out. Appreciate you sharing.
- I had trouble self hosting as well. Actually it was federation after the initial set up which was the problem. I gave up for now tho.