I remember back in the day, I had a free .tk domain. Good times. Apparently dot.TK was run by Freenom as well.
I had a look in Wayback machine to see if they had a copy of my old site. But the first snapshot of the domain in the Wayback machine archive seems to have been after some random Chinese website started using the domain instead of me.
Makes sense though that the Wayback machine does not have my pages in their archive, I was in upper secondary school at the time and the only people that visited my website was probably myself and a handful of my friends from school.
I also went to dot.TK to see if it was possible to re-register my old .tk domain, but the search didn’t work. Guess if Freenom is giving up it may already be impossible to use dot.TK anymore.
I loved .tk domains. I used as them as hostnames for Minecraft servers. I would redirect play.[servername].tk to the server IP and the normal [servername].tk was the shop. Good times! Couldn't have learned more about DNS and domain names without them.
Yeah, despite all the (valid) concerns about spam and abuse of free domains, I think there's value in a "throwaway" TLD. I was grateful to be able to get free domains to play around with back when I was a broke teenager and couldn't justify a real domain.
How can you spam by creating a free domain? Or did you mean that search engines currently rely on fact that it is expensive to have many domains and their ranking algorithms get broken with free domains? Maybe they should just change their algorithms then, for example, have human-moderated search.
> and abuse of free domains
What harm can you do with a free domain? I don't understand.
I had a look in Wayback machine to see if they had a copy of my old site. But the first snapshot of the domain in the Wayback machine archive seems to have been after some random Chinese website started using the domain instead of me.
Makes sense though that the Wayback machine does not have my pages in their archive, I was in upper secondary school at the time and the only people that visited my website was probably myself and a handful of my friends from school.
I also went to dot.TK to see if it was possible to re-register my old .tk domain, but the search didn’t work. Guess if Freenom is giving up it may already be impossible to use dot.TK anymore.