owls.io ➡️ shirls.org

The Context

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

When I registered it, I just wanted a short domain.
I would be needing to type ssh owls.io often!

But for three reasons, I've decided to retire owls.io in favour of shirls.org:

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 allows me to selectively switch off my email addresses that happen to make their way into a spam list.
2. .io domain renewal fees have increased to ~4x the price of the OGs, .com and .org.
   1. A one year renewal of a .io domain is approximately half the price of a yearly standard Netflix subscription. That's not necessarily a lot of money, but it seems odd to me to pay something in the same order of magnitude for hosting a 1kB plaintext file versus gaining access to a global media distribution platform.
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 registered shirls.org.

I like that it's still short. I like that it evokes an online community vibe, with peers like debian.org, wikipedia.org, mozilla.org, npr.org, rust-lang.org, and many other .org domains.

Shirls is an alias a few of my friends use to refer to me. But I think for people unaware of that, it also works as an unassuming website title or 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 still have owls.io.

But there are two problematic services: email (federated mail, a classic, you may have even heard of it) and matrix (federated chat, definitely more esoteric).

For email I needed to tediously update my email address on every online account I've ever signed up for. There are 400 accounts in total. 🫠
To be fair, I'm thankful that the task is even possible. If I didn't have a password manager I'd have certainly lost access to many of these accounts.
Not only that, but future holders of the owls.io domain would have gained reset password access to many of them too!

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 🙂

And there we have it. owls.io is gone, long live shirls.org!

Footnotes

[1] -

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