Creating a censorship resistant domain service for educational zoo projects

The Motivation: In 2024, the domain for the popular zoosexual lifestyle magazine zooey.pub (now zooeydotpub.zdu.se) was seized by a rogue domain registrar. This incident highlighted the vulnerability of zoosexual projects to malicious service providers as well as the risk for deplatforming. Commite at staying defiant dedespite the adversity, this situation motivated us to create a censorship-resistant domain registration service for zoo activists and educators.

The Process: We spent weeks researching censorship-resistant domain providers and extensions. We ultimately decided to register a short domain, "zdu," under the .se TLD (Top Level Domain). This would allowed zoo projects to use it as a domain extension similar to other popular second-level extensions like co.uk or gov.au.

Success Story: Our efforts were successful! We now host multiple educational zoo resources that are censorship-resistant. They are free to use our .zdu.se domain as their main identity or as an optional backup. This makes it possible to ensure that the educational zoo projects will always be able to have a memorable name that can't be taken away from them.

Next Steps: We are currently working on opening up registrations to allow every zoo with an educational project to use this domain. We also hope to be added to the public suffix list, which would further enhance the security and legitimacy of .zdu.se domains, although that will only be possible after increased adoption with at least 1000+ individual domains.