I've never written a line of ruby in my life. For me, Crystal is an easier and asthetically prettier alternative to rust. It's syntax and type system are superior to golang. It doesn't use a giant VM.
I typically suggest something like your first 25 domains are exempt, registered businesses also get some reasonable amount. Past that there should be a relatively hefty squatting fee. Maybe additional exemptions can be applied for.
While true, a free and open web is generally desirable, and we'd like to keep the barriers of entry for federation to a minimum. If someone was ready to start mycool.forum, but doesn't have $500/yr to start a website, they must now wade through a garbage pile of "minimum $2,000 bid" squatted domains, weird TLDs that could declare your domain premium and charge $400,000/yr at any time, maybe even if the only thing "premium" about the name is that your website got popular, or buy a domain like themycoolforum50.com.
This might be only one managable issue, but these things add up, and the more they add up, the more facebook becomes the only website people use.
I do have a complaint about relatively new TLDs. Did you know .forum domains are $500 to $2000 per year?
We live in a world where everybody is complaining about censorship and nazis, but one of the best new TLDs for an independent forum is prices out 99% of the market!
Of course, there are plenty of TLDs in the $5-$20 range, which are great, but this will cause cheap TLDs to become crowded and .forum will be a ghost town.
Forums generally don't make money. Any forum making money, probably isn't making enough to budget $500 extra in another domain. Any company that would say "wow, $2000/year is acceptable" would already have something like {forum,community}.acme.com.
My primary use case is that I don't want my end user(s) to know the IP address of my core application.
But, the option to pay someone other than AWS/GoogleCloud and then have to write my own lambdas is also a plus.
Something similar, but for "fetch metadata on this URL" (tags, description, title, etc), version 2 of that being support for when the end target is an SPA, or also a "take a screenshot of this URL" would also be nice.
Categorically, what I've seen of this falls closer to "lintable comments" than it does "actual static types". Static types are a foundational aspect of crystal, it's not like a sticker slapped on as an after thought.
Crystal does a better job with making portable binaries. For example I have written an app that's a 20MB alpine docker container. A comparable app written in Elixir used an 800MB alpine docker container.
I think Elixir is one of crystal's top competitors, but only for servers. Probably you'd never leave Elixir to write a webserver in Crystal. That's just Erlang's specialty. You would leave golang, Ruby, python, PHP, etc. for crystal though, because of the type system, performance, threads, binary, etc..
I've actually started using crystal to write the kinds of scripts people would normally use python for, despite it not being a scripting language.