About Namestead

I’m Robin Millette — a polymath with questions, which is a polite way of saying I follow a problem wherever it leads, across whatever tools it takes to actually understand it.

Why this exists

In 2026, ICANN approved Verisign’s request to delete every third-level .name domain — names like first.last.name that people have used for personal websites and email addresses for up to 25 years. Read the full story if you haven’t already.

What struck me wasn’t just the deletion — it was the scale, quietly buried in a regulatory filing: roughly 22,000 registrations, gone, with no grace period and no public comment period. Thousands of people are about to lose a domain name, a website, an email address, sometimes all three at once, and most of them probably don’t know it’s coming yet.

I couldn’t do anything about the ICANN decision itself. But I could look at the data. Namestead loads a .name zone file into SQLite and lets you search, filter, and explore it — by class, by DNS signal, by provider, by how much is riding on each domain. It exists so the scale of this isn’t just a number in a PDF; it’s a table you can filter down to the exact domains affected.

Domain class

Every domain gets classified by what a zone file alone can honestly prove — see the classification logic in scripts/load-zone.ts:

• Confirmed — a second-level name (e.g. example.name), appearing directly in the zone. As certain as a zone dump gets.
• Probable — a third-level name (e.g. sub.example.name) with its own NS delegation. Likely an independently registered third-level domain, but a zone file alone can’t fully prove separate registration — hence “probable,” not “confirmed.”
• Child — a third-level name with no NS delegation of its own. More likely a subdomain hanging off its parent’s second-level domain than an independent registration.

What it’s built with

Astro, SolidJS, Drizzle ORM, and daisyUI, running against a node:sqlite database built from a raw zone file. See Score for how domains get ranked, and Providers for who’s actually hosting the infrastructure behind them.