Actually : it's a really nice move to keep this domain up and under control for one year! Moreover, I guess that people relying on this service will soon start to see the errors, go to the website, understand the situation and move on... so 1 year is quite enough I think. It's not like it was a service people use once a year...

While it is a nice move. I think the best option is to crowdsource retaining the domain for 5-years or so. Since the cost of a domain renewal isn't that much I personally would be willing to chip in for 2-years of that cost. Because if that domain comes up for grab it will most likely be caught during the auction period by someone looking to get ad money.

Oh come on, you can't be that cynical?

The creator started the project 5 years ago because people around him without technical ability wanted a DNS ad blocker, but didn't know how to setup pi-hole. His peak MRR through Patreon was 13$, and he received one or two separate donations of ~10$ every month as well. The servers alone cost him more money than he received.

Dutch source: https://tweakers.net/nieuws/191950/openbare-pi-hole-adhole-v...

> Oh come on, you can't be that cynical?

Christel Dahlskjaer, the former head of Freenode's staff who transferred her interest in Freenode Limited to Lee, resigned in March. Dahlskjaer, with the help of Richard “RichiH” Hartmann, took over Freenode after project originator Rob Levin (lilo) died in a traffic accident in 2006 and Levin’s brother tried to turn the project into business. She was an employee of PIA at the time of the Freenode Limited transaction.

What did Christel Dahlskjaer do next?

https://www.indexoncensorship.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04...

While they never said they wouldn't hand it over to a steward, it also requires MORE work on their part to vet any strangers to ensure they are not there to abuse the system.

Handing it over to another public ad-blocking DNS resolver might be reasonable, but I think it's more honest to disable to service to let users know (in spectacularly failing way, true) that this particular service is going offline (basically, don't transfer the data to a service these customers have not signed up for).

Since it's DNS, they could also just resolve everything to their own homepage saying the service is dead, but that would still break a bunch of non-web-browser apps.

where did he say he's not willing to sell or let a steward step in for domain maintainance costs?

I think that it would be more efficient to do so NOW, when a lot of people rely on his product, than in 1 year, when most people will have found something else...

As this product will stop working, people will move on quite fastly

I think it's just responsible. And maybe he dosen't want to be the one that allowed triggering a lot of porn ads on people that trusted him (and his domain) to avoid ads

But how can he know which steward to trust? If you want to be sure your users won't get sold out, best to simply shut down.

After what happened with uBlock I wouldn't trust anyone to continue a project like this. Much better to shut it down and to allow the community to come up with an alternative.