How do custom top level domains like you can get from Neocities work? For example, corru.observer and corru.works. My understanding is that making your own domain name is really hard or expensive, and a custom TLD is harder. And i’m pretty sure Neocities is run by one guy, so surely it can’t be that hard to set up a domain name as an individual.
A TLD is just a name. For my own local network, I use all sorts of TLDs, and 20 years ago I used FreeDNS which let me register my own TLD for free.
What’s different on official Internet TLDs is that there’s a n organization that manages the “official” TLDs, and to register a domain name you have to pay money to one of their representatives to claim exclusive access to a domain name.
Different TLDs within that structure are owned by different entities and have their own restrictions as to who can claim sole use of a domain and how.
But there are now a bunch of newish TLDs that have been sold to raise money for the org as a whole, and their owners can charge whatever they want to register a domain on them.