so I guess they're one of the ones that will hold onto it for a while after it expires?

Not sure if namecheap does this domain parking thing. And to be frank, trying to snatch it up when it expires is not a great plan.

I don't know anything about how Tor/onion or I2P / P2P works.

The appeal of Tor/I2P is that the host can be anonymous. That makes it possible to self-host without exposing the server's IP (and therefore general physical location and possibly personal identity of whoever owns the hardware). Domains on these networks aren't registered in the same way that domains on the clear net are registered, either. No need to provide PII for a domain. That's the short of it.

This comes back to the initial conversation on privacy and trust. This all started moving because Saidit was no longer considered trustworthy, after all. Private conversations on here can be read by site admins. But they can probably be read by the hosting provider, which is likely a third party. The plan was to put that trust in rDrama and their hosting provider instead. And with the links being posted by Carp, that trust was perhaps misplaced. So if you ask me, going forward we should eliminate these middlemen at the very least. If we're paying for a hosting platform, the people managing the hosting service should be people inside our community. If we want to limit access even further than that, then we should consider self hosting.

I'm up for exploring hosting platforms since it would be no worse for privacy than rDrama running everything. And as long as expressing the views held here is legal in the countries that we're doing business in, total anonymity isn't super important. Just enough anonymity that the crazies can't identify us.

-edit-

I should also add that I think users' anonymity should be valued over their privacy. If you want private conversations, seek out an E2E encrypted platform outside of saidit. Assume everything posted here is public.