Cloudflare loses 22% of its domains in Freenom .tk shutdown

Same here. .tk was the only one back then that allowed you to have your own domain name without subdomains. My memory is that:

1. freeserver.com/~userna <- This was the first URl you could have, sometimes with something inside another directory (freeserver.com/users/u/~usernam).

2. username.freeserver.com <- This wasn't that bad but it didn't look professional. Tripod used to do this.

3. username.fs.com <-- A service with a short domain that provided free subdomains. This was similar to 2 but shorter. Some of them allowed you to chose the domian part.

4. username.tk <-- Among all the free options, this was the best one by far.

Then we grew up a bit and started paying domains :')

In italy we had 3000.it

https://web.archive.org/web/20010331143129/http://www.kliman...

SPOILER: I didn’t become a webdesigner

I remember in the early 90s telling Mom that I built my own website. Mom was like noway that's impossible. I can't remember exactly where it was but it was like zoogatyler1.go.com or something. I think it was owned by Disney? I must have been around 7 or 8 but I remember being so excited. I think it was more of a homepage than anything. I started delving into those .tk sites when I was around 11 or 12 probably.

same - I remember hosting a small web server from a crappy pc at my parents house and using a .tk to serve the site.

Probably not the smartest thing to do at the time since I may have opened up all ports on the router to get it to work, lol. No https. No security. No moderation. Copy and pasted some html from a site that I thought was cool, search and replaced text to make it my own.

It was kind of like a microblog before twitter, fb, ig, blogspot, tumblr.

I used .co.nr alongside .tk for a while, before moving to .co.cc, and then finally managing a way to buy my domain.

Oh man, this brings back memories from high school!

.tk was a blessing for us.

I remember switching to cjb.net because you could get free wildcard email accounts for your domain.

I used to host my websites wherever and then having a redirect to it. Two I remember was pagina.de/dr.enima (roughly translates to site of dr.enigma, my nickname back then) and i.am/supermatrix - a website dedicated to the movie the matrix which I love.

I think both of those pages were hosted in geocities and had pretty long urls...

In South Africa you could get a za.net domain for free. They stopped new registrations quite some time back as the spam era of the internet was getting started. I still have my domain and use it for all sorts of different things. From email to experiments.

Name server changes are still done through email.

I remember flexing on my friends that the google site I had got a proper name with .tk!

God. I’d forgotten all about .tk until reading this comment. What an amazing time.

What are kids using these days?

Serious question, Heroku and .tk were such amazing services if you weren't old enough to get a credit card.

My favorite was .uni.cc, I had a couple of those free domains back in the day.

i share a similar story but today we don't seem to have any alternatives. it is a shame really but i wonder if there is something else that does not involve freenom today.

Did you also use 000webhost.com with .tk domains like me?

> You can’t win with these people

This is the classic fallacy of assuming that because you see comments of type A and comments of type B on the same forum that means they're the same people. They're usually not.

A more accurate way to phrase this is "you can't win with ... people". Whatever you do will end up ticking off some subset of the population.

> The people complaining that Cloudflare hosts these criminals would be the first ones complaining that Cloudflare has too much power when taking down websites it doesn’t like.

It'd be interesting if you could point to a single example of someone taking both sides. I strongly doubt these are the same people.

Well CloudFlare already does exactly that. It already set the precedent you are referring to. That's why it feels odd that they don't shut down literal criminals too. They have no issues with shutting down stuff, but they are famously very lax when it comes to actual criminal stuff. I'm not trying to say that they were wrong or right for engaging in content policing, what I'm saying is that the precedent isn't new.

There is no contraposition. In both cases, big company simply does something it wants.

This comparison actually highlights that there is no “system”, because some (imaginary) impersonal entity decides that those bad actors are allowed, and those bad actors are not allowed. Some public sensibilities are given as a reason, but no one is actually asking anyone's opinion on anything. Still, there are people who believe that Santa Claus brings presents for free, and that the whole thing is not governed by typical hypocrisy and typical politics behind closed doors. The thing is, you've built a turnpike, you can now bargain with people interested in sharing control over that turnpike.

This seems like such a weird problem to me. If they're criminals, just send the cops? If you can't send the cops, then they aren't criminals?

How do you end up in this limbo where you need critical infrastructure to play judge?

> You can’t win with these people

People who want to live in a just world often get in the way of things. I'm just not sure why you're mad at those who want justice and not those who put profits above all else?

> that Cloudflare hosts these criminals

Oh.. it's not that they host them, it's that they go out of their way to protect them, and the profit streams associated with them.

Not the same people at all.

What criminals are you referring to? The operators of .tk, or their users?

It would follow that Cloudflare is tacitly admitting they have been / are hosting a large number of domains used for fraud and abuse. That surprises me, given the time and effort they spend mitigating fraud and abuse. Anyone care to explain what I'm missing?

If .tk was such a clear signal for abuse, isn't it a bad thing that signal no longer exists?

I'd rather ICANN finally introduce .free, give a few years to alert everyone, and those developing spam filters can treat it how they want.

You think that fraud is just going to go away because .tk is gone?

As someone who had also grown to automatically ignore .tk domains, perhaps we've lost a reliable spam signal and honeypot

Interesting, .xyz was by far higher on my list of disreputable spam domains.

I'd be happy with that one shut down too.