A nonprofit called the HCCF wants to carve out a new top-level domain — .self — specifically for people running their own infrastructure.
The Human-Centered Computing Foundation is pushing for .self as a TLD designed to support self-hosting: running your own servers, your own services, and your own data rather than handing it to a platform. The pitch is that self-hosters deserve a recognized place in the domain name system, not just a cobbled-together subdomain on someone else's cloud. The proposal is early-stage, with the org laying out a vision rather than announcing an approved registry.
The timing is notable. Interest in self-hosting has grown steadily as cloud pricing, data-privacy concerns, and platform shutdowns have pushed more technical users toward running things themselves. A dedicated TLD would lend that community a kind of institutional legitimacy — and potentially make self-hosted services easier to identify and configure. That said, ICANN's process for approving new TLDs is slow, expensive, and competitive; wanting a TLD and getting one are very different things.
The proposal drew modest attention on Hacker News — 42 points and 39 comments — which roughly tracks how niche this remains. Plenty of self-hosters are already perfectly happy with .local or a throwaway domain, and a new TLD only matters if the infrastructure around it — DNS, browsers, certificate authorities — actually supports it.