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Comment by notyourwork | Hacker News Reader

There really isn’t a good solution for this for the masses, is there?

Buying a domain is not difficult, nor is configuring it with a mail service like Fastmail. Yes, it’s slightly more involved than signing up at GMail, but it’s less complicated than doing your taxes (YMMV). The more people do it, the more helpful resources and service would appear for it. The problem is most people don’t care until they get unlucky and their account gets cancelled for inscrutable reasons. It would be better to have regulation that protects users.

The risk of an average person forgetting to update their credit card details and irrecoverably losing a personal domain is almost certainly thousands of times higher than them being accidentally and permanently locked out of a Google or iCloud account.

Where I live, the most common payment method for such services is direct debit from your bank account, where the details never change unless you switch banks; and in the rare event that you switch, you can make use of a service that banks are legally required to provide for transferring debit mandates to the new account. I bought my first domain about twenty years ago and never had to change anything regarding payment.

A lot of people live paycheck to paycheck. I’d wager even more people on average would lose their domains with this approach either by forgetting to or being unable to put the necessary funds in their account, and having the payment declined.

Losing your entire online identity because you didn’t pay on time is an absolute show stopper for an enormous number of people.

Most people are not tech people. They do not know or car, or even care to know, about the details and importance of maintaining and protecting an online identity. They won’t remember to update payment details until things start failing. They won’t check their email frequently enough to notice before this happens. They will ignore text messages, either assuming they’re scams, spam, or unimportant.

You’re in the US, presumably? Is it really that common there for people to overdraw their account to the extent that direct debit in the $10 range would fail? That would be a very rare occurrence here. And you wouldn’t immediately lose your domain just because the payment failed once. It would be a much longer process.

People also have a mobile phone number with a plan they have to pay for. I don’t see why a domain should be any different, and it isn’t actually that different in my country.

5% of American households have no bank account at all - either because fees are too high or because they have cashed bad checks or failed to pay bank fees in the past and are now refused an account.

Another 25% had their bank balance go below zero in the past year. And that number is worse than it sounds, because it doesn't include people who have selected to have transactions fail instead of put their balance below zero. https://www.consumerfinance.gov/data-research/research-repor...

Although I can and have managed domains and mail services, I don’t agree that what you described is for the majority. Do you really think that’s true?

In the current state, the majority will need some help, similar to how they need some help when something goes wrong with their laptop. But as I said, if this would become a more widespread practice, more services would become available that make it easy and that help in case of trouble.

The biggest impediment is probably that most people aren’t willing to pay (say) $10 per month for a domain and email hosting like they do for streaming services, because they’re used to email being free. So they remain at the mercy of the big providers.

But I can at least encourage the HN crowd here to move to independent services and to use their own domain.

You’re first two sentences prove my point that this is not adoptable by most. Cell phones are ubiquitous and permeated all tiers of society. Hosting your own domain and email isn’t. I get the limitations but my point was that this isn’t practical by most for technical reasons. Ignoring the financial challenges of convincing people to spend money on something that has been free for their entire life.

You can use your own domain with Google at least, and I’m guessing Microsoft as well. It could be a good middle ground where you control your email and just let google,etc use it for the time being. It looks just like gmail but you can always get out if you have to.

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