Actually top level domains are more censorable than just having lots of regular domains all over the place with different top level domains.
I think the DNS threat is overblown.
Firstly there are A LOT of Hive front ends. Every community has one.
Very difficult to shut them all down. It is something that would need to be done at government level by slow cumbersome legal process.
Secondly people can create a new domains and set up a new Hive front end very quickly.
Condensor is Open Source and quite easy to run.
All DNS does is convert a URL to an IP address.
For something you are using all the time like a Hive front end you can just use the IP address directly. You only need to record it once as a bookmark and DNS blocking won't work.
You can also change DNS server to one that doesn't censor.
Curse of knowledge bias exemplar
As someone who specializes in this field, I disagree. You must build to the lowest common denominator in respect to your userbase, ESPECIALLY when under active attack. Make no mistake, if a platform gains any notoriety with the 1984/Fahrenheit 451 cult, it will be attacked from all angles.
Can you imagine saying this to the average suzy creamcheese user out on the internet? It's not a very realistic expectation over simply having them type .crypto, and having a browser resolve to the blockchain seamlessly.
What about when your VPS provider joins in the fun and cancels your account (IP) as well. If you had control over the domain, at least you could swing it over to another IP, or even do it seamlessly with a technology like GSLB and perhaps clever use of site-to-site tunnels.
Maybe you can use the old way - to write IP into your .hosts file ...
Case in point. These IP addresses belong to Amazon.
