We use your nickname in the URL to your page - and always include it to the left side before pnouns.fyi (in technical terms, your nickname is a subdomain of pnouns.fyi)


For instance:

  • alexs.pnouns.fyi
  • alexs.school.pnouns.fyi
  • alexs.school.pnouns.fyi/with/friends/


We feel this provides urls that "sound grammatically good" [1] and sound like a sentence - "these are Alex's pronouns (for your information)", or "these are Alex's school pronouns with friends".


However, subdomains have a technical use as well - they generally are used to point to different servers and services.

We use several subdomains, for instance backend.infrastructure.pnouns.fyi is used to point at our primary servers, and not a user's published page.


We have several other names - our secondary servers are named after D&D spells, including fireball.pnouns.fyi.  Our project management (and potential future knowledge base) is at track.pnouns.fyi.


When we first setup our format of URLs, we recognized that we'd need more domains, and didn't think we'd be able to think of everything we'd need.  In fact, infrastructure, fireball, and track all were created well after we made this decision.


Instead of creating the list, we decided to prevent users from creating any nicknames/namespaces with words that are in the dictionary.  This means we knew 'track' was going to be available when we tried to figure out what subdomain to use.


Why didn't you expect this to have a big impact on limiting users?

We had two reasons we thought this wouldn't have a huge impact on users.


First, we've found using pluralized forms of your name produces a "better sounding URL" - "Flyyn's pronouns" vs. "Flyyn pronouns".


Second, usernames are often taken by someone else well before you get to it - especially when the requested username is a single English word.


What can I do?


  1. If the pluralized form of your name is sufficient, and is available, that provides a zero-work alternative.
  2. Contact us!  We manually approve English words on a case-by-case basis.
    1. We have no issues with many words - for instance, 'evergreen' would be a perfect example of something we'd accept.
    2. We'd generally turn down nicknames that are slurs/rude/abusive, could cause confusion (billing, beta, about, english, contact), or may be used for technical or administrative purposes (infrastructure, server, public)
    3. We need to complete one piece of work before we can fully bypass our dictionary word checks.  Feel free to reach out now - we can reserve the name, and let you know as soon as that work's done.
  3. (future) We may allow users to use a custom domain name at some point down the line - so your page could be hosted at 'pnouns.example.com' (if you own 'example.com')
  4. Finally, if you can't get the name you are desiring, please look for an alternative username that could work for you.  We know it sucks when someone else has taken or reserved an email address or username.



[1] We're no language prescriptivists - we just personally feel like these URLs just sound better to our ears so set page URLs to be in this structure.