You can create categories under your nickname/namespace - this may help you for a variety of reasons.


We default (and recommend) using one of our preset categories - these include contexts (school, family, online), social media platforms (twitter, instagram), languages (en, es), and more.


With a preset category, you can use them as a subdomain: "alexs.work.pnouns.fyi".


If you use a custom category, you can only use the category in the path: "alexs.pnouns.fyi/at/myschool/".


Technical Limitations

This is really a technical limitation that we can't really avoid.


To secure our site (e.g. serve it with SSL so the URL starts "https"), we need a security certificate for our domain name.

We can list multiple names, and use wildcards to match a whole set of domains, and we do!  However, we can't have multiple levels of wildcards.


You can actually see what domain names are listed in our certificate by clicking on the padlock in your browser!

Our certificate for published pages includes the following domains:

  • '*.pnouns.fyi' - this is used for 'alexs.pnouns.fyi'
  • '*.work.pnouns.fyi' - this is used for 'alexs.work.pnouns.fyi'

(and so on)


This is a hand-selected list of categories that have subdomains listed in the certificate.  Other categories cannot be served securely.


What to do

There are a few options to approach this.

  1. Use a custom category
    This will prevent you from using the category as a subdomain, but you can always put it in the path.
  2. (future) Use a custom domain
    We may support using custom domains in the future, allowing you to create whatever domains you wish.
  3. Ask us to add a category
    We are limited in the number of certificates we can request per week, and how many domains can be in each request. We have capacity to add many more categories, but do want to focus on adding categories that can be used by multiple people.
    1. We manually vet each request on a case-by-case basis.
    2. One person who wants to use the category is enough, and it doesn't have to be super common.  It just should be applicable to more than one person.
    3. It should generally fall under the following categories, although this is a non-exhaustive list and we're certainly open to others:
      • Environments (school, friends, family)
      • Social Media (twitter, instagram)
      • Languages (We use language codes - en, es, etc.)
    4. It should not be something that could be considered rude or offensive.  We do not allow slurs, or language that could be triggering to many people in our default categories (even if we would allow it as custom user-defined category), as others will be shown it potentially unexpectedly.