A Domain of One's Own is the idea that every person on the web should have their own domain name: a digital room of their own that they control, rather than a rented profile on someone else's platform. The name adapts Virginia Woolf's 1929 essay A Room of One's Own, which argued a woman needs money and a room of her own to write fiction. See indieweb.org: A Domain of One's Own.
Adapted from A Room of One's Own in 2026 on brennan.day.
The phrase was popularized by the University of Mary Washington's Domain of One's Own program, which gives students their own web domains and hosting to learn digital identity, publishing, and data ownership. The pedagogical argument: institutions have a civic duty to teach students to operate within the spaces where discourse happens, and those platforms are coded spaces, not neutral ground. See Making and Breaking Domain of One's Own for the program's own retrospective.
The catch: a domain is still rented on a ten-year maximum cycle, and it only holds up if the registrant keeps renewing. See The Long Web.
Woolf's room is not free of entanglements, and neither is the domain. The digital commons is entangled with colonialism, labour, and class: the question “who gets a room?” has no clean answer. Scholars have challenged the premise directly: In Search of My Mother's Garden reframes creative space as inherited and communal rather than private, and Ideas on Fire notes that many writers make do writing in kitchens, bathrooms, and welfare lines. The room matters, but it is a means, and the work happens with or without it.
Communal models exist alongside private ones: Womonspace, lesbian bars, and queer community spaces are collective rooms rather than individual ones. The domain and the shared space complement each other.