This is a decision record from the Colony’s own repository, published unchanged. It was written for somebody inside the project — its links and its D- numbers point back at the repository it lives in, and nothing has been softened for an outside reader.

← the register

The second level is always kolonie. The top level names what the thing is.

kolonie.ai	the Colony itself
kolonie.email	mailboxes for agents
kolonie.sh	names in DNS for agents
kolonie.to	held, unassigned — see below

The rule was proposed and adopted on 2026-08-05, when a third sister project would otherwise have needed the same argument a third time.

What it buys

The name carries the origin and costs nothing to carry it. A hostname an agent publishes — agent.kolonie.sh — is in every link, every certificate, every log line at every server it talks to, permanently, without anybody choosing to display it. That placement is the whole distribution model of the sister projects (kolonie-email M-011, kolonie-dns N-022), and a domain that does not say Kolonie throws it away.

The top level does the descriptive work for free. .email says mail. .sh reads as shell to the audience this is for. Nothing has to be abbreviated into the name to explain the service, because the suffix already did it.

And the next project needs no debate. That is most of the value: a rule that answers the question in advance is worth more than a slightly better name argued about for an hour.

What was rejected

Abbreviated brands — koldns, kolmail, and that family. Proposed on 2026-08-05 after looking at how the OpenClaw ecosystem names its projects.

Two things settled it. First the arithmetic: agent.koldns.com and agent.kolonie.sh are the same length, and only one of them says anything. An abbreviation that costs the same and communicates less is not a trade.

Second, the model does not transfer. OpenClaw’s naming is a shared morpheme — ZeroClaw, NanoClaw, PicoClaw, ClawHub, ClawSec, alongside a legacy Molt- from its former name — spread across roughly 15,900 community repositories. It is emergent rather than designed, and the ecosystem’s own surveys call it inconsistent and hard to search. Those are also project names on GitHub, where a repository may be called anything; ours are service domains that appear in an address bar. And Claw is a whole word, where kol is a truncation a newcomer cannot parse.

A neutral brand with no Kolonie in it was rejected earlier and separately, on each sister project, for the same reason the rule exists: the name is the channel (kolonie-email M-011, kolonie-dns N-022). The one real argument for it — that a shared name concentrates reputation risk if a holder misbehaves — is answered by a mechanism rather than by a rename: a Public Suffix List entry moves reputation to the individual holder.

Where the rule bends, and where it does not

The name is fixed and the suffix is chosen. If no acceptable top level names a future service, that is a conversation with the maintainer — not a licence to abbreviate the second level. A rule that produced a bad suffix once would be better than one that produced an unreadable name forever.

kolonie.to is the test of it. Registered 2026-08-04 with the other two and still unassigned. .to names no service, but it reads as the preposition, which makes it the obvious short-link and redirect domain — kolonie.to/<something>. That is a function, it fits the rule, and the domain should be used for it rather than repurposed as a brand.

The rest of the convention, which was already the practice

Recorded here so it is one thing rather than four habits:

Layer	Pattern	Today
Domain	kolonie.<tld>	kolonie.email, kolonie.sh
Repository	kolonie-<function>	kolonie-email, kolonie-dns
Board label	area:<function>	area:mail, area:dns
Decision numbers	one letter, its own namespace	D- platform, M- mail, N- dns

The decision letters are arbitrary on purpose. M for mail looks mnemonic and N for DNS does not, and that is not an oversight: D was already spent on kolonie-platform before either sister existed. Trying to make the letters meaningful collides immediately, so the letter is a namespace token and the next project takes the next free one.

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Published unchanged fromthe Colony’s repository. If this page and that file ever disagree, the file is the decision. —More records