Looking at TLDs again out of boredom
vaporeon.attorney, for when you want to get all your legal advice from Vaporeon
It looks like it's still possible to register a .af TLD? So I'm not sure what the problem on that one instance was
You enter vaporeon.cafe
You see:
To be clear, I am not even looking whether those domains are owned by someone else, just thinking of funny domain names out of boredom
vaporeon.channel 
🎥
A domain that you can only use for commercial purposes... 
Usage Requirements
.CHANNEL domain names are intended solely for use by creators and publishers to host or redirect to storefronts featuring digital and physical products, and audience-building mechanisms for the purpose of monetisation.That enforcement action including termination may be taken for a domain name that is being used in a manner inconsistent with the .CHANNEL usage Requirements;
vaporeon.apartments, they're free as long as you can tolerate the Vaporeons
vaporeon.apartments, under the water and water and water water 🌊
vaporeon.city, full of vaporeon.apartments
vaporeon.cloud ☁️ ✈️
vaporeon.computer, if it is available (I didn't check), would be 42€ per year, that's a lot more than my .net domain...
vaporeon.cruises
You're on a cruise ship, standing on the deck, looking out onto the ocean
In the distance, you see rippling water, which doesn't look like a normal wave
Suddenly, Vaporeon jumps out of the water and onto the deck of the ship!
vaporeon.country, which is full of vaporeon.city, which are full of vaporeon.apartments, which are full of vaporeon.fish
vaporeon.delivery
Your shipment of Vaporeon has arrived 
There is .dog, and there is .cat, but for .cat, you have to speak Catalan
vaporeon.education, where you teach 
how to be
There is a .email TLD??? But why?
@vaporeon_ my favorite website URL is
so Jeff Gerstmann (video games playing man/former games journalist/former co-creator of Giant Bomb) does a YouTube series where he plays every single NES game and is ranking them on a list. "By the science", he calls it. All his rankings are scientific. (this is a joke and there is no science.)
But someone else made a website for it that displays the list, and it's at 8bitnintendo.science
@vaporeon_ fwiw; one day I do want to have a website, using one of these funny tlds.
But I think the issue is deciding on the domain, rather than the TLD?
Is that the right term? I googled "parts of the URL" and they defined "domain" as the entire www.example.com
but I mean the example part of it
@The_T URLs follow a hierarchical structure, some registry owns .com, potentially some other registry owns .fish, and so on. So now if you want to buy a domain, you buy e.g. the-ti.com or vaporeon.fish from some registrar. The prices are different depending on which TLD you want, and also some countries have requirements that you, for example, have to live there in order to register the domain. I can't get e.g. vaporeon.aq because .aq has the requirement of working in Antarctica or maintaining a remote installation there, I can't get vaporeon.cat because I don't speak Catalan, .fish is more expensive than .net, and so on.
And once you own the-ti.com, you yourself can set whatever sub-domains you want for it assuming that you can set up the DNS properly, e.g. you could have streams.the-ti.com and blog.the-ti.com and whatever.the-ti.com and point them all at different servers or to different web sites on the same server if you wanted
@vaporeon_ right, I know all that.
I just think the-t.anything would be a terrible name. I'd rather it be like... something related to the stream, or like the name of my friend group as a whole, something along those lines.
Less about branding and more about flavor.
(That said, I also need a better name for my YouTube channel. "The T" has poor SEO.)
@The_T Did I misunderstand the question, then, if you know all that?
@vaporeon_ yeah. My question was, in the URL itself
www. example .com
.com is the top-level domain
www is probably something else
example is... do you just call that "the domain" or is there another name for it?
because one site seemed to think "the domain" is the whole thing, from www. to .com
@The_T @vaporeon_ the domain is example.com and www.example.com is a subdomain
@wallhackio @vaporeon_ alright then I propose calling the word "example" the "domain title". All in favor reply or don't reply to this toot
@The_T @vaporeon_ so when you buy a domain apparently the two parts are called the "Top Level Domain" (TLD) and "Second Level Domain" (SLD)
in example.com "example" is the SLD and "com" is the TLD
www.example.com is a subdomain of the domain example.com
@wallhackio @The_T Yeah, but if I tried to buy a domain name like vaporeon.co.uk or vaporeon.net.ye, then I'd be buying a domain at the third level and not the second
@wallhackio @vaporeon_ I'll begrudgingly accept second level domain
@The_T @wallhackio Well, on my web site, I set up a CNAME record, which tells the DNS resolver that it should go resolve e.g. daxpy.net instead of www.daxpy.net
But there is nothing inherently special about www by itself, it is no different than if I did mastodon.daxpy.net wadi.daxpy.net, some-stupid-string.daxpy.net (none of these subdomains currently exist, to be clear, only a CNAME that redirects www.daxpy.net to daxpy.net)
I could instead create a different A record for www.daxpy.net and point it at a different IP address, it just would be a bad thing to do because it would be confusing
@The_T @vaporeon_ like, when I made my blog I purchased clodsire.social
And i put the blog at the subdomain blog.clodsire.social
@wallhackio @The_T @vaporeon_ example.com is itself also a subdomain
arguably, even as a root domain, i think .com is regarded as a subdomain of a domain with no name
@wallhackio @The_T @vaporeon_ like, secretly, the actual name of the full domain is www.example.com., or at least, BIND seems to think so
@aescling @wallhackio @The_T @vaporeon_ So part of the point is that `com.` is not actually a "root domain", although it is called a "top level domain" because it's a domain name, at the top level underneath the root (which, as you say, doesn't have a text representation in DNS). There are nameservers for the root ({a-l}.root-servers.net), while `com.` uses {a-l}.gtld-servers.net. (You can see them in action by running, say, `dig +trace example.com`.)
@aschmitz @aescling @wallhackio @vaporeon_ aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
@vaporeon_ @The_T @aschmitz @wallhackio i think they mean they’re overwhelmed
@aescling @wallhackio @The_T @vaporeon_ (To answer the question earlier in the thread, technically `example.com` would be a second-level domain, but in that domain name, I'm not sure there's a specific term for just `example`. If the subject of "domain names that random other things can be shelved under" is of interest, you may enjoy the Public Suffix List: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Suffix_List and matching "effective top-level domains".)
@wallhackio @vaporeon_ oh, right; a subdomain would be the part before that... but does "www" count in that instance or is it something else special?
I've never really understand how going to
www.example.comand going toexample.comare different; like usually the latter redirects to the prior but I've seen a few weird websites where it doesn't?