The only safe domains for everyday use are .com, .net, and .org - and the well-known country codes that have been around for at least 10 years. Anything else is going to cause you headaches, and your "investment" for a short memorable domain name is not going to feel worthwhile.
Plus, the registrars are scum with these TLDs. Just stay away.
Because the name you wish to register is not available as .com domain.
> Nobody is going to remember or type in such a domain
I don't think this is true, I live in Europe and we have tons of country tlds, people use and remember them.
Also is chris.blog really so much longer to type then chris.com or a lot harder to remember? I don't agree.
At first it might feel strange to type something else then .com but as I said in europe we have country tlds and it works well.
It depends on the audience. If you have a non-technical audience or you are e-commerce a .com is basically a necessity still.
City domains, like sadiq.london.
Admittedly, I can't remember any publicity of the weirder ones, like .lol or .xyz.
There's still plenty of good ones left. I created a program to help me find them: https://github.com/jedberg/wordgen
In particular, I have a 5-character easy to spell meaningless name that I am reserving for some large scale service I will build in the future.
Getting an unregistered .com is tough, but many are available at a reasonable price on secondary market. I define reasonable price as under $1000. When I decided on the Sendlinks name, the seller originally wanted $5000. I made the decision to buy it at that price once I was ready to re-brand.
Since no one else would likely buy the name, I wasn't too concerned about someone taking it. Fast forward a few months later, I was at the point where I had money and so I decided to just buy it then and cross that item from my launch checklist. Luckily for me, the price dropped to $2000.
I own the .com domains of my Internet nickname and my last name among other properties.