Hi people of Qoto! Nice to meet you, my name is Evan.
I LOVE the innovations on this Mastodon instance. It is truly inspiring, especially the group service you developed on groups.qoto.org!
I was wondering, I noticed that the domain public.group is around $2000 USD on Namecheap first year only, (a mere 13$/year after that !! !!) .
I personally would be willing to contribute 200 $ to the devs of Qoto to purchase that domain name and host a federated group service on it.
Having @mygroup@public.group as an available asset would be a huge service to the Fediverse! A dream come true!
Would anybody else be willing to contribute funds towards a fundraiser to make this happen?
Please let me know and I can set up a liberapay, get in contact with the owners to make this a reality!
High hopes for the future,
Evan
@evanb great to have you here. If you get enough people interested I'd be happy to host our group server there, or a clone of it.
Curious though, is the domain name that important? Wouldnt 2K be better spent paying developers to add new features?
@freemo Hi, and thank you! Great question, I really do think so! Accessibility is really important, and I feel often overlooked in the tech community.
Groups is one of the key obstacles in popularizing the fediverse as a fb alternative.
It is easier to tell a newcomer "just tag @public.group," than "@groups.qoto.org " --although it is a small detail, I think attention to it has high payoff.
Plus the scale, since this improved UX would affect every single mastodon instance, makes this seem like a valuable use of resources.
What do you think? And thanks again for your kind regards :)
@evanb If there is interest in it im willing to support it. It certainly gives the impression of a more universal service rather than one specific to QOTO. Perhaps we can find a good domain name that is actually free?
@mcduquesne @freemo Ohh, that's a really good one, nice catch!!