I bought xn--mn8h9e.ws a couple years ago just for fun. I think it's fun to own an emoji domain, but what I can say definitely say is that it's still a bad idea to own one if you want to get emails to it.
Popular thick email clients still struggle with utf8 domains and I've fiddled around with several email providers that just have complete failures trying to send as well.
I tried pasting the email address in a bunch of popular services (LinkedIn, Instagram, etc) as my email or the domain as my homepage and most of them treat it as invalid, and I found some legitimate breaking bugs in their services in trying it out.
Edit: case in point, just noticed HN also falls in the camp of unsupported emojis in the text body, so another example :). Added the punycode instead
Trying this emoji thing out inline. Had not even heard of the auto-symbol translation
As a test, looked for (star).com [might show up with .com, or %E2%98%85.com ?](EDIT: nope) Long form is: https://www.xn--p3h.com/ Source was a question on StackExchange about weird domain names.[1] Seemed to be related to the authors hunt for "prestige" emojis.
Apparently owned by Gregg N. Ostrick of GNO, Inc. bought wayyy back in 2001-04-19. [2] If this is such a new idea, how did Mr. Ostrick buy (star).com back in 2001? Got some hijinks with time traveling retcon sales of emoji names?
Notably, typing the (star) symbol in the browser (Firefox) does seem to work, and gets auto-extended to xn--p3h. Others, like (star)(star)(star) appear to work (xn--p3haa) just have no domain squatter. Others, like crazy bail bonds names, or eBay reviews, such as A(star)++ appear to resolve (https://www.xn--a++-0m5a.com/). However, I'm not sure if those actually work.
Also, confusing stuff. Like Wingdings (star), which turns into unicode << do Not actually go to the what Appear to be visually the same. (https://www.xn--iba.com/) Well beyond G00GLE.com (zerO)(zer0) issues.
I don't feel like emoji add anything substantial to a textual conversation, it's mostly useless fluff. I don't miss it on HN, so I disagree with your use of "reduced" here. :)
I was playing around with this about a decade ago and discovered one of the dark patterns of the interwebs -- the emoji domain name would first show as 'available' and if I didn't immediately pounce on it I'd go back and it would show up as 'available for auction' or some bullshit.
Pretty sure I ended up buying a turtle and did absolutely nothing with it. Almost had the hammer and sickle for some quality trolling...
--edit--
This just reminded me of reading about Milka (the euro brand) taking away the domain name of a woman named Milka and, being drunk at the time, immediately buying milka.eu.com (or something very similar) and just setting up a webpage with a picture of a statue of Stalin I'd taken while in Hungary. Not too sure why they didn't go after my obvious trademark infringement?
-- edit II because I'd mixed Stella with Milka, my bad Stella.
I find it a little disingenuous that the author keeps dropping the TLD and describing the emails as cool@<poo>, when the TLD is still part of the email address. Interesting experiment, anyway. I'm surprised that it worked well enough to get a functioning email service working with it. A lot of systems must assume that an email address or domain name wouldn't include emojis.
Same, switching between <emoji>.cctld. and bare <emoji>. made me question the author's understanding about DNS as a whole, those two are very much different things! Then again, the average tiktok viewer wouldn't, I assume, care too much about needing to tack on .kz to an email as long as there is an emoji in the address.
But yes, it's an amusing (ab)use of punycode, but still fun in spirit.
An NS version of this story would somehow involve the protagonist needing to travel to Kazakhstan, undertaking a multiple-day journey in a convoy of trucks across some mountains, to secure a meeting with an officious local bureaucrat who turns out to be bribable with in-game currency from a Chinese gacha game he’s obsessed with.
Wait, aren't emojis explicitly prohibited from being used in IDNA? Or do the implementers just not bother to read the "IDNA Rules and Derived Property Values" table and simply allow anything that's a correct punycode?
Readit News
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26422799
2k addresses registered
If you take that as a live counter of the number of subscribers that's 2k a year, and pretty good!
If you take that lifetime registrations that's not so good.
Also assuming that that copy is accurate.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26423117
Popular thick email clients still struggle with utf8 domains and I've fiddled around with several email providers that just have complete failures trying to send as well.
I tried pasting the email address in a bunch of popular services (LinkedIn, Instagram, etc) as my email or the domain as my homepage and most of them treat it as invalid, and I found some legitimate breaking bugs in their services in trying it out.
Edit: case in point, just noticed HN also falls in the camp of unsupported emojis in the text body, so another example :). Added the punycode instead
As a test, looked for (star).com [might show up with .com, or %E2%98%85.com ?](EDIT: nope) Long form is: https://www.xn--p3h.com/ Source was a question on StackExchange about weird domain names.[1] Seemed to be related to the authors hunt for "prestige" emojis.
Apparently owned by Gregg N. Ostrick of GNO, Inc. bought wayyy back in 2001-04-19. [2] If this is such a new idea, how did Mr. Ostrick buy (star).com back in 2001? Got some hijinks with time traveling retcon sales of emoji names?
Notably, typing the (star) symbol in the browser (Firefox) does seem to work, and gets auto-extended to xn--p3h. Others, like (star)(star)(star) appear to work (xn--p3haa) just have no domain squatter. Others, like crazy bail bonds names, or eBay reviews, such as A(star)++ appear to resolve (https://www.xn--a++-0m5a.com/). However, I'm not sure if those actually work.
Also, confusing stuff. Like Wingdings (star), which turns into unicode << do Not actually go to the what Appear to be visually the same. (https://www.xn--iba.com/) Well beyond G00GLE.com (zerO)(zer0) issues.
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1719132/how-do-i-registe...
[2] https://www.whois.com/whois/%E2%98%85.com
https://itp.cdn.icann.org/en/files/security-and-stability-ad...
https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/idn-emojis-domai...
Even if emoji was invalid, unicode in general is valid in domain names, and should be converted to punycode. Local domains exist too.
It’s not the email client’s job to decide whether a domain is valid, it’s DNS’.
but others are not, so we're reduced to using things like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ to communicate
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35524948
Pretty sure I ended up buying a turtle and did absolutely nothing with it. Almost had the hammer and sickle for some quality trolling...
--edit--
This just reminded me of reading about Milka (the euro brand) taking away the domain name of a woman named Milka and, being drunk at the time, immediately buying milka.eu.com (or something very similar) and just setting up a webpage with a picture of a statue of Stalin I'd taken while in Hungary. Not too sure why they didn't go after my obvious trademark infringement?
-- edit II because I'd mixed Stella with Milka, my bad Stella.
Within a few days almost all of them sold and made a couple grand in affiliate commissions.
I wrote about it here: https://marc.io/emoji-domains
Email forwarding is also a clever use! Nice to get that recurring revenue.
[1] https://xn--f28h.to/
But yes, it's an amusing (ab)use of punycode, but still fun in spirit.