Queer.af mastodon domain has been seized by the Taliban

i_have_no_enemies@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 287 points –
Kevin Beaumont (@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social)
mastodon.world
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Sucks, but makes sense.

I'm surprised they even attempted to use that domain. The instance still exists and will need to be routed through a new domain. Which, again sucks, because any reference links will be broken now... which... again... has me wondering why they even went with that domain in the first place. Albeit, it was a clever use of a top level. I wonder how many others are doing the same.

πŸ€·πŸ½β€β™‚οΈ

I suspect they skipped checking who controls that domain at the time and just saw that it would make for a good name. Not good practice but I can see how that happened.

The only shame here is that there is no way for an instance to "prove" it is the successor to a defunct domain.

A lot of Lemmy and Mastadon instances have really obnoxious names. I hope they learn from this as use a conventional domain/TLD, and not some random ass countries who could get taken away at any minute.

Is my instance in danger? 😱 Will Luxembourg disappear overnight?

You never know when the Luxembourgish taliban will take over.

NOONE EXPECTS THE LUXEMBORGIAN TALIBAN!

The fact that pornhub is HQ’d in Luxembourg leads me to believe this will be some sort of sexy taliban

Ahh. I have several domains and a lot of experience with managing various services, but I'm unfamiliar with any requirements regarding the federation process itself. I imagine this may be challenging, but not impossible to handle. Yet another level of suck in this situation.

I doubt most people know that country TLDs are different from vanity TLDs. I know when I look up domains, they're usually all smooshed together and then the terms are in a giant block of ToS.

The vast majority of people likely don't know that .tv isn't a vanity or official TLD, but the Tuvalu country TLD. And its royalties make up nearly 10% of the state's budget.

So... twitch.tv is actually twitch...Tuvalu???

Yes. Other common ones include .fm for Federated states of Micronesia, .io for British Indian Ocean Territories and .ai for Anguilla.
.be, of youtu.be, is Belgium.

Back in the days bit.ly was a quite popular link shortener (it's still a link shortener) and when shit went down in Lybia gadda.fi (or some other spelling don't remember) plopped up as a novelty shortener to protest against using just any country TLD for random internet domains. .fi should be fine, it's Finland.

Interesting. I wonder if that has anything to do with why some companies started dumping them for regular TLDs.

Similarly, the .io TLD is for territories around the Indian Ocean. But for some reason, it became popular for cheap little flash-style games.

Yeah, this is most probably true.

Honestly though, I don't even know what most of the generic domains are that were created. It's still deeply ingrained in me that any serious website should be using .com, .net, or .org. But... the amount of domains that were purchased just for the purpose of resale at an astronomical value has made so many of those unreachable.

There are some dot-coms that I have wanted for years which have been sitting stagnantly for more than two decades. I'd love to buy them, but there's no way I'd pay the asking price. At least generic TLDs break that stalemate for a lot of folks.

Here in Germany most (German) websites use .de, so its definetly not unprofessional here.

I am also not surprised that .de is one of the most used country TLDs out there.

From one of the admins:

To the people who are like β€œWhat did you expect to happen when you picked a .af domain, are you idiots?”

Yes, we were aware of the possibility of suspension from the start Yes, we were aware that political circumstances could change But thumbing your nose at conservative autocrats as an even minor form of protest is fun In the end pretty much everyone has migrated out successfully (and I’ll continue to help anyone who remains) We’ve all gotten a fun story out of this

I’ve been signalling the probable demise of queer.af to my followers for the past year. We knew the end was coming; we just anticipated it to take a little longer

So long; it was fun while it lasted.

Similar thing happened with an instance I was on, it couldn't be fixed and they had to start a new instance. Think the problem was federation related, you need every instance admin to change the domain manually in their instance

I was afraid of that. If this is common enough, i think it's something the devs can introduce a feature for which would propagate such a change. Doubt it's high on the totem of things to do, though.

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