Procure a .coop domain and migrate to it

[chadwhitacre]

Part of #995.

[clone1018]

So our goal here is to move the gratipay website from .com to .coop?

[chadwhitacre]

Yes, that is the proposal. Thoughts?

[clone1018]

I think a weird TLD like that causes customer confusion.

[clone1018]

I'm not against it however I'm just curious behind the driving force and financial / marketing gains.

[chadwhitacre]

The purpose of this would be to more fully identify as a cooperative (#72 → #992 → #995). The fifth cooperative principle (#992) is education of the public, and using the cooperative marque and domain name would be part of that. If we believe in cooperatives enough to identify as one, then in my view we should go "all in" and proudly further the broader cooperative vision by differentiating ourselves as such. Yes, gratipay.coop is weirder than gratipay.com. Is it the right kind of weird?

P.S. Should go without saying but of course .com would redirect.

[clone1018]

Alright! I understand now, thanks @whit537

[chadwhitacre]

We could also do like Loomio: they use loomio.org for their product, and loomio.coop for internal stuff. So we could stick with gratipay.com for user-facing, and migrate inside.gratipay.com to gratipay.coop. Would be good to reduce our cookie surface anyway.

[kaguillera]

My concern with changing to a .coop is that people may not find us and worry that the site is a spoof of the original .com. If only use the .coop for inside.gratipay then that would not be an issue because it is really for the staff and thus we will be aware of the change.

[chadwhitacre]

@kaguillera We would redirect gratipay.com to gratipay.coop if we wanted to use the .coop for the main site. That said, I lean towards gratipay.coop replacing inside.gratipay.com, because I think too often cooperatives overemphasize that they are cooperatives. Very few users care!