About the .socialmedia TLD

Why a new top-level domain rather than another links page, why this particular string, and where the application actually stands.

Ask most people online where their audience lives and they will name a platform. Ask them what they own, and the answer gets uncomfortable. A handle is granted at will, revocable at will, and non-portable by design. It is not property — it is a tenancy.

The domain name system solved exactly this for the web in the 1990s and has been quietly reliable ever since. A domain is the one identifier on the internet a person can actually hold: registered in your name, renewable on your terms, movable between providers, independent of any single app. What was missing was not the technology. It was a namespace that says, in the words people already use, what the thing is for.

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ICANN Reveal Day

One application for .socialmedia. Ours.

ICANN has published the full list of the 2026 round: 1,614 applications, 263 strings fought over by two applicants or more. .socialmedia is not one of them — nobody else applied for it, so there is no contention set and no auction ahead of it. Evaluation is what comes next.

See the official list

A handle is a tenancy

Four things it cannot do for you, however many followers are behind it.

You cannot take your name with you

The same person is @jdupont on one network, @j_dupont on another, @jeandupont.official on a third, and nothing at all on the fourth because somebody else got there first.

You cannot take your audience with you

Every follower relationship is a row in someone else's database. When a platform declines, changes its algorithm, changes its rules or changes hands, that relationship does not travel.

You cannot prove you are you

Verification has become something platforms sell, revoke and redefine. Impersonation stays trivially easy, and the badge that answered it is now a subscription.

You have no address

What you have is a collection of profile URLs on domains you do not control, held together by a link-in-bio page on yet another domain you do not control.

Rented against owned

Not every line goes our way — a platform handle starts with something an address cannot give you.

Rented handleOwned .socialmedia

The same name everywhere

Survives a platform's decline

Transferable and inheritable

A matching email address

First-party analytics

Verification you control

Free to start

A built-in audience

Why this string

Four criteria that matter over a twenty-year registry horizon. This one kept winning.

It explains itself

Most new extensions have to teach the market what they mean. This one does not. “Social media” is understood identically by a teenager in Lagos, a marketing director in Munich and a retiree in São Paulo, and it was borrowed largely untranslated into French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese and dozens of other languages. An address nobody has to explain starts years ahead of one that needs a campaign.

The category is permanent

Social media is not a vertical. It is a layer sitting under commerce, journalism, politics, music, sport, education and customer service. Namespaces tied to one product or one fashion age badly; namespaces tied to a permanent human behaviour do not.

It has two buyers, not one

And they do not compete for the same names. A person wants theirname.socialmedia as an identity and a hub; a company reads “social media” as a department, and acme.socialmedia is the natural home for its official directory — the page that says these accounts are ours and everything else is fake.

Social platforms are already moving to DNS

This part is not speculative — it is shipping. Bluesky lets you set a domain you control as your handle, verified through DNS. Mastodon and the wider fediverse verify identity by having your profile link back to a page on your own domain. In both, the trust anchor is not the platform; it is the DNS. How fast that shift goes is genuinely uncertain, and the case here does not depend on it being quick — it only gets stronger if it is.

Where it actually stands

The part applicants usually overstate, so here it is with the uncertainty left in.

12 August 2026

The ICANN application window closed — the first one in fourteen years. Our application for .socialmedia is filed.

Reveal Day · October 2026

ICANN published every application in the round — 1,614 of them, for 986 strings. Ours is the only application for .socialmedia, and it is in no contention set.

Evaluation

String similarity review, then technical and financial evaluation. ICANN's process, on ICANN's schedule — this is where the application is now.

Objections & contention

Objection periods still run for every string. On contention, we start in the best position there is — alone. String similarity review is the one step that could still group .socialmedia with another string; nothing applied for in the round contains “social” or “media”.

Delegation

We do not know when .socialmedia will be registrable, and anyone who tells you they know their delegation date is guessing. We publish progress as it happens rather than forecasting it.

So: the application is uncontested, but nothing is on sale yet, no .socialmedia name is registered, and no hub on this site is collecting anyone. What you can do today is put a name on the waiting list. The long version of all of this — the market figures with their sources, the objections we get asked about, and who is behind the application — is on internet.Best. What the address does once it is yours is on Super Follow, For creators and For brands.

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