On: .io domains with 3 letters remaining

[rdl]

Very short names are useful for link shortening. There are good reasons to pick names out of the "gTLDified" ccTLDs for that. IO isn't even a real country, so it's a better choice for ccTLD abuse than something totally stupid like LY.

[josteink → rdl]

So it's less stupid than something utterly stupid. Great.

And then people choose to base the core identity of their company/service on that. Needless to say, I wish them greatness.

[rdl → josteink]

I think it's totally responsible to have a shortener in a gccTLD as an adjunct to your main brand. e.g. quora.com has qr.ae as a link shortener.

I'm sort of against the whole concept of link shorteners, too, but if they're run by the site themselves, long-lived, and otherwise don't break the expectations of URLs/URIs, then they might make sense for mobile and type-in use.