More than one person has told me that they are slightly suspicious of #mastodon URLs, because most of them use uncommon TLDs like `social`, `engineer`, or `pizza`.
It might be worth explaining TLD basics on the common onboarding sites for Mastodon (like lists of servers, or explainers for what Mastodon is). These are people who don't really know what a TLD even is. #UX #fediverse #askfedi
My informal TLD explainer:
you can just buy a domain name for about $10 a year. there's literally no technical or security difference between any domain extension, be it .com, .org, .social, .engineer, or anything else. there's nothing that makes wikipedia.org more secure than wikipedia.party. (wikipedia.org is owned by the wikimedia foundation, unlike wikipedia.party.) A domain name is just something you choose to call yourself, and you give a company 10 bucks a year for the privilege.
It's basically the same thing as putting up a cardboard sign in front of your house, with the added restriction that your cardboard sign can't be an exact duplicate of one that already exists. wikipedia.org is only trustworthy because people go in the wikipedia library and note "right, got it. the cardboard sign that says wikipedia.org is good." and maybe when they see wikipedia.party they think "that cardboard sign isn't set up outside the library."
almost every domain name (TLD) is managed by reputable companies who respond to spam and virus takedown notices. you can look up domain names via a "whois" search, which is like looking up someone in a phone book. you can look up a domain on whois and see some basic facts about it, like how long it's been around.
I could create microsoft-official.com and there's nothing about .com that would get it closed faster than microsoft-official.cool . If anything, the .cool is an easier identifier that this is not a popular corporate site. By social conventions, major corporations stick to .com, .org, .ai, and so on. mastodon servers can be hosted on any extension, so a lot of people have fun with it - lgbtqia.space for example.
extra info: a handful of domains are not open to the public, like .google . in very rare cases, the group that manages the domain extension ("TLD") may prohibit some kinds of material. for example, .de is germany and they (presumably) ban holocaust denial. this is not something that comes up in practice basically ever.
cc @scottjenson
@BigHeadMode one more thing: When you see a 2 letter ccTLD, stick with the one for your jurisdiction. Each country can make up rules for these domains and they can change based on political movements. .af for example recently caused quite the exodus of Fediverse instances, when the Taliban took over.
May 28, 2026, 6:20 AMDifferent TLD's has different rules, so there is differences.
For example .dev - HSTS directly on that TLD
Some TLD's does not even support DNSSEC, or have a working WHOIS (instead uses RDAP)
@BigHeadMode Yeah, the new TLDs have been confusing a lot of people. Maybe I'm not understanding you, but this is a fairly generic problem, with ANY website having to deal. It's not clear Mastodon could really help this. But if I'm missing your point, please let me know
@scottjenson There are sites (official and unofficial) that point people towards different TLDs. I'm suggesting some language on e.g. the second and third image, that explains the TLDs are just names and don't have any significance.
The 3rd pic reflects how people may encounter mastodon for the first time - clicking a link someone sent.
A tough thing to convey briefly, and hard to weigh the extra text vs. the utility. That's why I'm not a designer.
Or maybe do a UX survey of non-mastodon-users and determine nobody minds the different TLDs. But it seems like some people consider nonstandard TLDs to be "sketchy".
"It's not just a Mastodon problem" - true, sort of. If this was Twitter, people would be encountering "sketchy" URLs to twitter.social and twit.engineer. That might devalue the brand/platform in people's eyes, because there's no canonical Twitter.com.
When you have one brand, like bit.ly or discord.gg, people only have to learn the brand/URL once. Mastodon UX paradigm is for readers (not yet account holders) to confront the "sketchy" factor every time, if people don't understand how TLDs work.
TLD fear is not a problem for you or me, but I wonder if it may be a problem for others.
