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Cover image for I just bought πŸ‘©β€πŸ’»πŸ‘¨β€πŸ’».to!

I just bought πŸ‘©β€πŸ’»πŸ‘¨β€πŸ’».to!

GrahamTheDev on October 29, 2021

Yes, you read that right, I now own πŸ‘©β€πŸ’»πŸ‘¨β€πŸ’».to. Now for a split second you may have thought I meant dev.to - of course not, I don't want a 5(6) ch...
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sidcraftscode profile image
sid

Have I ever bought an emoji domain? Nope.
Can I think of a good use for my domain? πŸ€” Maybe you can use it to host dev related stuff. Email would be fun.
Do I think emoji domains will ever catch on? Not really. At least until there is sufficient browser support and you can get a physical emoji keyboard. Typing emojis is hard and requires extra clicks, something that is especially hard on laptops. Actually on my iPad I had to manually type the link in because when copying and pasting I got this
https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/qqsxdmrk4gk8l5jx7ash.png
SEO is also probably a problem.

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grahamthedev profile image
GrahamTheDev

I think you nailed this 100%!

And yeah I don't think I will use it for anything other than a bit of fun...I might put my DEV.to demos on the site just for fun...provided I can link to the domain from codepen / jsfiddle!

Another experiment I need to run!

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mellen profile image
Matt Ellen-Tsivintzeli

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grahamthedev profile image
GrahamTheDev

Yup, this will be your average workstation of emoji domains catch on! 😜🀣

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posandu profile image
Posandu

Several weird things if you buy a Emoji Domain name and post it on dev.to

Being a unicorn

You own 2lkc

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grahamthedev profile image
GrahamTheDev

Well I am a unicorn, I poop rainbows and pixie dust. Why are you surprised by this 😜🀣

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posandu profile image
Posandu • Edited

This message was deleted for the good

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grahamthedev profile image
GrahamTheDev

I saw it though, yes those As 1s and Ys πŸ˜‰

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posandu profile image
Posandu

And don't think that's true. Forgive me

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grahamthedev profile image
GrahamTheDev

All is forgiven πŸ˜‹

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ivan_jrmc profile image
Ivan Jeremic • Edited

I personally think QR Codes are the domains of the future. Once we get a QR HTML Element and users can copy it and you can click or scan it there is no better way to navigate the web, no fights more over names every app/webApp gets an QR Code wich means the browser search bar needs some upgrades, you still need to be able to search the web like you search an app store, ahh and by the way I would love to see a merge of Browsers and App Stores, (AppWeb)? I imagine this to be a mix of apps which open directly without installation and other apps like games which you can install, I personally see AppStores and installable apps as a step backward because I think the Web with instant apps and instant streaming and instant gaming like stadia is the future the future should not have an installation process at all we had this in the 80's and then came the web, so no idea how Apple did it but Respect for creating an hype around old tech like installable software. Now that the internet is becoming faster I think we should focus on getting rid of installations, every App Store can still have an review process even for web apps, and instead of having normal ssl certificates maybe we need for each AppWeb a separate review which I don't mind.

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ahferroin7 profile image
Austin S. Hemmelgarn

QR codes are useful for sharing bulk information in a machine readable format, but they lack one key feature that’s kind of crucial for how most people currently use the internet: 99% of people can’t memorize them, and they cannot be communicated without some technology involved. dev.to is trivial to memorize. I can share it with someone who has never heard of it in a regular conversation without anybody having to pull out their phone and be reasonably certain they will type it in correctly (or closely enough that a search engine will find it for them). The QR-code equivalent is a 21Γ—21 image that has to have most of the pixels correct to work correctly, most people would be hard-pressed to memorize those 249 pixels (ignoring the alignment targets), and the only way to share it is an image.

This doesn’t mean they’re not good in some cases. If you pay attention to the actual URLs that are found in most QR codes that do in fact encode URLs (because they can encode other things), you will notice that many of them are long enough for typing them in by hand to be error-prone, hence why a QR code is being used to begin with.

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ivan_jrmc profile image
Ivan Jeremic

Hey;) What I meant of course is that the apps still have names even the QR codes for them exist, so typing dev.to in search in my concept will list it in search results and you can open it same as you type YouTube in the AppStore and then click the logo to open it, names and logos still exist, the internet I describe is kind of futuristic and hard to explain but see it as a giant open app store.

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dailydevtips1 profile image
Chris Bongers

I've bought quite a few a while a go, but they all expired now.
Like the premise, but back then it had so many downsides in people not being able to reach them πŸ˜‚.

Or trying to explain your domain is [emoji-christmas-tree].ws

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grahamthedev profile image
GrahamTheDev

Yup, impractical and silly and only developers will really appreciate them...but I had to have some fun!

Enjoyed the Live Stream Sunday BTW Mr Anonymous!

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dailydevtips1 profile image
Chris Bongers

Thanks! Haha
Yep def fun to own.

And they might become a proper use-case one day so hang on to them

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jerzakm profile image
Martin J

Sigh. Yet another meme project on my todo list. I think I'm shooting for a Threejs emoji interactive thingie. πŸ’πŸ˜πŸŒ
I almost forgot about existence of emoji domains until your article popped up in my feed. Darn you!

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grahamthedev profile image
GrahamTheDev

Yup, DEV has a lot to answer for with introducing to or reminding me about pointless yet mildly amusing side projects I want to waste time and money on! 🀣

Glad to be of service 😜 and monkey loves banana is an awesome idea.

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lionelrowe profile image
lionel-rowe

The combined emoji thing is most likely just a font thing in your email client. Most likely different email clients will display it differently.

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GrahamTheDev

It is to do with the fact that you need a combiner unicode character that isn't supported in domain names.

I get the concept but don't know the right terms, but you combine two emojis with a special character [U+200D] to create the woman at computer or man at computer.

URLs don't support this invisible character (I think because of security) so as far as I am aware it is impossible to fix the issue on Outbound emails as technically my domain name is πŸ‘©πŸ’»πŸ‘¨πŸ’» and it is just how unicode characters are decoded that allow me to have πŸ‘©β€πŸ’»πŸ‘¨β€πŸ’» as the domain (as it decodes to the correct characters).

I have no idea if that is a good explanation but sadly I think it can't be fixed in any email client etc.

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lionelrowe profile image
lionel-rowe • Edited

Ah I see. The first half makes sense, but the combining characters are themselves Unicode characters ([...'πŸ‘©β€πŸ’»'].length === 3), so it's not just something in how Unicode itself is decoded. It must be something in the punycode spec that states that invisible characters are simply ignored. I just checked and it seems this is the case:

new URL('https://πŸ‘©πŸ’»πŸ‘¨πŸ’».to').href
=== new URL('https://πŸ‘©β€πŸ’»πŸ‘¨β€πŸ’».to').href
// true
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Pretty interesting!

Edit: Actually, it might just be Chromium's implementation, rather than the spec itself. In Firefox, new URL('https://πŸ‘©πŸ’»πŸ‘¨πŸ’».to').href is xn--qq8hb0wb.to/, whereas new URL('https://πŸ‘©β€πŸ’»πŸ‘¨β€πŸ’».to').href is xn--1uga01807aca52bc.to/ (a domain name that doesn't resolve). Sure enough, opening πŸ‘©β€πŸ’»πŸ‘¨β€πŸ’».to doesn't work in Firefox (but πŸ‘©πŸ’»πŸ‘¨πŸ’».to works fine).

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grahamthedev profile image
GrahamTheDev

Yeah it is something I should actually learn properly as the amount of times I get confused between &X2394; and U+212C etc. as ways of encoding emojis is quite embarrassing (as was that sentence probably as like I said, I don't understand it all properly 🀣)!

And punycode was the term I couldn't remember so thanks for that!

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patarapolw profile image
Pacharapol Withayasakpunt

It will be converted to punycode, anyway.

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getdevved profile image
Get-DevVed-YT

The only problem I see with this is discoverability. Not all keyboards allow for emoji and not many allow for inserting. So, you kinda just have to copy and paste to get it to work. An alternate solution is using Punycode to type the URL, but almost no one knows how to use it. Interesting idea though.

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grahamthedev profile image
GrahamTheDev

Yup, I would totally not advise this for anything that isn't silly, for the exact reasons you mentioned.

Plus other issues I have found are that a lot of sites don't think emojis are valid as part of URLs, so you can't set your own URL on profiles (although I did manage to work around that with a little help on Twitter...but with πŸ‘¨πŸ’»πŸ‘©πŸ’» as the result!)

Even buying the domains in the first place is difficult as most sites don't think they are valid as well!

Completely impractical...quite good fun though! 🀣

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siddharthshyniben profile image
Siddharth

Let us know when the email thing works (or doesn't) πŸ“¬

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grahamthedev profile image
GrahamTheDev • Edited

Email received from g@πŸ‘©πŸ’»πŸ‘¨πŸ’».to

It almost works - unfortunately it appears that combined emojis don't work!

But I can send an email to g@πŸ‘©β€πŸ’»πŸ‘¨β€πŸ’».to and it is received just fine πŸ‘

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siddharthshyniben profile image
Siddharth

Nice!

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eljayadobe profile image
Eljay-Adobe

Whimsical and fun! I like it!

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grahamthedev profile image
GrahamTheDev • Edited

Yes, it has been a long week in case you are wondering why I did this! 🀣

And I don't know if it is just me, but buying an emoji domain just seems so very wrong...

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darkwiiplayer profile image
π’ŽWii πŸ³οΈβ€βš§οΈ

I wasn't even aware that tongan unicode domains are a thing; might have to grab some myself ;)

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grahamthedev profile image
GrahamTheDev

The process is a bit messy, so I ended up using register.to as a lot of sites said domains were invalid!

If you find a better site to do it through then let me know! (p.s. one tip is mali domains ".ML" accept emojis and you can get them for free! But I obviously wanted a .to domain to mess with DEV!)

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scottshipp profile image
scottshipp

Ha ha! I love it!

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

clever

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brewinstallbuzzwords profile image
Adam Davis

There's emoji domains?? That's awesome. I had no idea you could do that

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grahamthedev profile image
GrahamTheDev

Yeah, a lot of the main ones like .com etc. won't let you (although a few people managed to grab some emoji domains before they stopped it so ☺️️.com is valid), but the obscure ones like .to, .ws, etc. will let you do it.

Highly impractical but a bit of fun for a Friday!

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siddharthshyniben profile image
Siddharth

I'm going to get one to!

πŸ‘©β€πŸ’»πŸ‘¨β€πŸ’».siddu.tech

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grahamthedev profile image
GrahamTheDev

That's the sensible way to do it (and not a waste of money either!).

Subdomains would have been a lot better for a stupid post...but I had to see how dfficult it was to buy an emoji domain (it isn't actually that easy as the domain sites keep breaking when you use emojis! 🀣)

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siddharthshyniben profile image
Siddharth

πŸ˜‚ that should have been trouble! Which provider did you get the domain from?

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grahamthedev profile image
GrahamTheDev

Eventually I bought it from register.to as everywhere else was saying the domain wasn't valid.

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Alvaro Montoro

I used to own seΓ±oramontoro.com (for my wife's Spanish class), the Γ± was a pain in the neck and not worth it in the long run as students had trouble typing it.

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GrahamTheDev

Yeah I can imagine that would be a pain, and I imagine a lot of sites don't even accept Γ± as a character when setting up profiles etc.