The migration from .io to .org

The Context

For about 10 years^[1] I've been using the owls.io domain to host my email, my homepage, and a number of self-hosted open source projects.

I don't have any specific appeal for owls as in the birds. I just wanted a short, quick to type domain for all the inevitable incantations of ssh owls.io that lay in my future.

For three reasons, I've begun the process to retire owls.io:

1. I receive a fair amount of spam at my owls.io email address.
   1. In the future I plan to heavily leverage Apple's Hide My Email feature, which will allow me to selectively switch off any email address that makes its way onto a spam list.
2. .io domain renewal fees have increased to ~4x the price of the OGs, .com and .org.
   1. One year's renewal of a .io domain is approximately half the price of a standard Netflix subscription. I find that's a tall ask for hosting a 1kB plaintext file.
3. There's a reasonable chance that all .io domains will be retired in the future.
   1. Refuting arguments claim that .io is too big to fail, and that may well be. But I look forward to not needing to care about the outcome anymore.

So I snagged shirls.org.

I like that it's still short. I like that it evokes the online community vibe from the likes of debian.org, wikipedia.org, mozilla.org, npr.org, rust-lang.org, and many other .org domains.

Shirls is an alias of mine used by a few of my friends, so it has meaning to me. But I think for people who are unaware of that, it also works as an unassuming site title onto which I can develop a small personal brand.

The Migration

For the majority of the services running on owls.io, "migration" is just updating a line of text to point to the new domain. That, and adding a redirect from the old URL for as long as I'm still in control of owls.io.

But there are two problematic services: email (federated mail, a classic) and matrix (federated chat).

For email I have begun the tedious process of updating my email address on every online account of mine. There are 400 accounts in total.
I'm thankful that the task is at all possible, for without a password manager I'd have certainly lost access to many of these accounts. Not to mention, future holders of the owls.io domain would have gained reset password access to many of them!

For matrix, the protocol appears to be missing any sort of built-in account migration feature.
My plan is, I'll spin up a new server with a new account at shirls.org, I'll use my old account to invite my new account into all of the rooms I still care about, then I'll set my old user status to something like moved to <user>@shirls.org and decommission the old server 🙂

Ezpz!

Footnotes

[1] -

> whois owls.io | rg 'Creation Date'
Creation Date: 2015-06-24T03:50:46Z