With just 24 hours left to go, we wanted to take a look back at the dotMeow Kickstarter campaign :)
First off: it’s not too late yet! If you support us now, you still have the chance to get your hands on up to ten vouchers for your own .meow webdomain, each valid for a year! Please consider supporting us if you haven’t already, because every penny over the pledge goal will go towards operating costs and makes it more likely that my lovely coworkers get to sleep the coming two years :p
It has been a WILD couple of months. When we went live in December, I’ll admit to a degree of… not skepticism, but maybe pessimism. I thought the whole thing would peter out and the dream would wither on the branch then and there.
We hit 20K in the first day. 40 in the first couple of weeks. Things have gone from cool to wacky since then, and were topped off by last weekend’s 12-hour livestream featuring some truly outstanding guests. Game developers (Brian Bucklew, creator of Caves of Qud, and Kevin Van Ord, writer at Larian), voice actors like Gianni Matragrano, youtube essayists like Sarah Z and Noah Caldwell-Gervais and even a surprise appearance by Abigail Thorn, playwright and creator of Philosophy tube. You can still catch the vod here, if you want to catch the chaos.
The chance to connect to the community, and how excited that community has been, has been nothing short of awe-inspiring. Any denizen of the internet who we tell about the project sees its value and that brings me just… so much fucking joy.
So, in case you don’t know what I’m talking about… let’s do this one last time.
dotMeow is a nonprofit that aims to seek the funds and rights to create our own gTLD (or generic Top Level Domain), like .com or .org. Our goal is to take back a piece of the internet away from soulless corporations too big to fail, and to put it back in the hands of the queer community, the weird communities, and the cats. An internet where you don’t need to worry if your website will be taken down because you have the wrong flag next to your name.
But as a nonprofit, we wouldn’t be pocketing the money. Instead, our “profits” will be going back into the community, with a very heavy focus on supporting queer projects, organizations, and charities. Instead of a larger company taking the proverbial $20 out of rotation, we put it back into the community.
So, one last time:
If you want to support us, now is the time. Yes, we’ve hit our goal, but every cent will go to operating costs and every dollar (or Euro) above our target will make it easier for us to make it happen and actually make a living doing it.
Not only that, but supporting us gets you a voucher for a year’s worth of a .meow domain when we go live (we’re aiming for 2027), and if you get ten you can daisy-chain them so you have a guaranteed .meow domain for a decade.
Please, consider supporting us. .meow means the world to us. We have the chance to actually make the internet a better place, an opportunity and a chance that doesn’t come along very often these days anymore.
Thank you, everyone, for all your support so far, and we hope to see you all with us in the future, making the internet more fun, more open, more queer, safer, more whimsical, and filled with many, many, many more cats.
.meow
PS: if you see this and you go "oh no! i missed it!", then worry not, kickstarter allows us to add late joiners (for digital rewards) so don't hesitate to go check it out still!
