One thing to keep in mind is that this Mastodon instance is purely used by the government to speak officially. It is not a platform where regular folks can create new posts (they can still comment on and like posts made by the government).

They are basically removing their dependency on Twitter as a platform for sharing information to the public.

They are called Handshake domains. I think Namecheap sells them as well. But for now you can only access them by changing your DNS server or using a browser extension.

Nice! I just got my personal instance up and running so I may give this a shot.

Thanks, I'll check it out.

I don’t think any normal browser has plans to incorporate any crypto related domains. Brave comes closest with its native .onion support, but even that doesn’t seem to be interest implementing these alternate roots.

Apparently Opera has support for it, but I don't use/like Opera so I can't confirm.

As far as I can tell, practically nobody is running these alternate DNS servers on federated servers, so a Lemmy domain on such hosts would be isolated from the rest of the network.

Yes, currently these domains are useless. A Lemmy instance on such a domain would only work if both servers and browsers support the Handshake protocol natively (without changing your DNS server and stuff). But maybe this will change in the future. Personally I think it would be cool to be able to come up with your own TLDs.

I’m surprised Namecheap and Porkbun even dare sell these, though they do come with the necessary warnings at least.

I was just as surprised as you! I was actually looking for a ".ks" domain last week because I had the same idea, and then I saw that Namecheap had it, only to find out it was a Handshake domain.

I'm on iOS. I've tried Liftoff!, Mlem and Thunder. So far I like Mlem the most.

I have never used Boost for Reddit, but I'm still excited to see what Boost for Lemmy will be like.