.self: a new top-level domain pitched as a home for self-hosting

The Human-Centered Computing Foundation (HCCF), a US non-profit, has launched a public campaign to secure a new top-level domain called .self, arguing that today's web infrastructure has been shaped around data extraction and advertising rather than the people who use it. The foundation published the announcement on 21 June 2026.

“The internet is the most powerful communication tool ever created, yet the infrastructure underpinning it has been leveraged by the tech industry to extract our data and exploit our attention,” the organisation wrote, presenting .self as an alternative architecture for the web.

What the proposal contains

According to the foundation's initiative overview, .self is designed from the ground up to support self-hosting and rests on four pillars. The first is one subdomain per person: names such as ab.self would be available free of charge, and buying or selling them would not be allowed. The second is service sharing, aimed at a common obstacle to self-hosting — the lack of a routable home connection — by offering VPN tunnels so that a service can be published even without a global IP address.

The third pillar is an open-source client: the software needed for self-hosting, including VPN, email, TLS certificate generation and dynamic DNS, would be released as open source. The fourth is open governance, under which decisions about new features and usage restrictions would be taken by the community rather than by a company.

Where the application stands

HCCF says it is an approved participant in ICANN's Applicant Support Program, the track that discounts application fees for applicants meeting its criteria. The domain industry publication Domain Incite reported that the standard base fee is $227,000. The application still has to satisfy ICANN's review and technical and operational requirements, so it is not yet settled whether .self will eventually resolve.

Questions still open

Comments on the foundation's blog and in discussion threads have pressed on practical details. Readers asked who is funding the effort, how the one-domain-per-person rule would be verified, and whether self-hosting would actually be required — and, if not, what the domain would add over existing free alternatives. One commenter also noted the irony of a human-centred organisation distributing its overview as a PDF rather than on the web.

Even so, the proposal has drawn attention from self-hosting and independent-web communities, which have long argued that portable digital identity is one of the web's missing pieces.