Why is the domain owned by an icelandic entity instead of the nonprofit?
Where is the company registration number of the nonprofit (required to open a bank account - where will donations be held, etc).
Its all very vague and handwavy at the moment - just like early days of freenode...
EDIT: Loads of downvotes, but why? Any of you want to leave a comment instead of just downvoting?
This comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27289097 Your comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27289100
Im happy to give them time - im just pointing out the current state of things, and what sets off my alarm bells. These are all things that can be addressed, no doubt.
All the bells you are ringing has been pointed already (and since Libera got opened), it's in progress. I trust them to do the correct things, and will be addressed soon. Maybe as you said in another comment that it should have been made more clear on their website, tho.
According to the WHOIS information, the registration of libera.chat was made 2021-04-23. This registration was made ~1 month before the organisation Libera Chat was announced. As far as I can tell, the organisation could not have made the registration as a legal entity before existing.
Seeing the registrar is Namecheap, I guess someone made the registration and made use of the zero-cost Whoisguard service available. Perhaps the registrant's contact details point to Iceland. Some of my domains point to Panama, what gives.
> Where is the company registration number of the nonprofit (required to open a bank account - where will donations be held, etc).
As the OP title suggests, Libera Chat was assembled a week ago. There is no Swedish law requiring that an organisation registers, but as you suggest, it will be necessary to register a legal entity for financial purposes. Fulfilling the paperwork of registering a non-profit organisation with Skatteverket and thus receiving an ORG number generally comes after the fact of the foundation of said organisation.
Non-profit organisations in Sweden are real and protected entities, registration or not.
Domain name ownership can be transferred. It's trivial for a founding member to register the domain name first, then transfer ownership to the organisation once it has been founded.
Frankly, WHOIS records is to crude a metric to really pass judgement on anything nowadays. The masked entries in the lookup for libera.chat i.e. "REDACTED FOR PRIVACY", are typical of registrars not overstepping GDPR compliance when making them public.