queer.af, a Mastodon instance, has been killed by the Taliban

Fediverse@lemmy.world – 67 points – 6 months ago

The admin stated they won't be renewing the domain because .af is now controlled by the Taliban.

Link to post: https://queer.af/@postmaster/111733741786950083

Could we, like, leave the clickbait headlines to reddit? Thanks. The queer.af admins just decided -- wisely -- not to renew the domain considering who the fee would go to.

It was pretty clickbaity but damn I did laugh

The queer.af admins just decided – wisely – not to renew the domain considering who the fee would go to.

So the Taliban being in control of the .af domain. Made the admins not to renew the instance. To put in away, "The instance has been killed by the Taliban.".

No. The instance being killed by the taliban is the opposite of that is happening here.

The taliban has done nothing, in this case. The admins of the instance have chosen not to keep the instance due to not wanting to fund the taliban in anyway.

This phrasing fucks up which way the action flows, which is important for a headline to get right to remain accurate to the story. Does that make sense?

Nope. That’s extremely misleading.

Nah the admins killed the instance before the Taliban could at best, kill it, at worse proxy it and gather information.

Seriously gaining control of a domain can allow you to do pretty nefarious things.

Reading that headline scared me. For a moment I thought the instance owner was killed by the Taliban.

Another reason to not use ccTLDs.

If the Taliban take over Australia I’ve got bigger issues to worry about than my domain name.

that's why australia has their army of spiders

God help us all if we have to break out the Emus

There's nothing wrong with ccTLDs as long as you pick the ccTLD of a country you trust.

Vanity ccTLDs (.ly, .af, .io) are almost always a terrible idea, but I don't see why I would trust a megacorp backed TLD like .coffee any more than I trust .dk or .fi. The same goes for de facto American ccTLDs like .com/.info/.net.

Yeah that's true. We just need to research who owns the TLD before long-term site and everything is ok.

Better to just setup your own ccTLD, for maximum trust.

(honestly only half joking)

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.io is the British Indian ocean's territory, probably not really a risk i doubt anything's going to happen there.

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What alternatives are there? Just the big .org, .com, .net ones?

Nope. The ones you're mentioned are gTLD (generic top-level domain) but most of the other domains are generic TLD too. See here for the list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains

Just don't use country-code TLDs because they can removed by those countries. For example fmhy.ml and now queer.af.

Just use .net or so. Or make it dependent on where you host, so .fi or .de or .us or whatever. TLDs aren't just for lulz, and getting specific country ones just for "funny" combinations just leads to stuff like this happening.

No need to limit yourself to US tld's, country ones for funny domains can be stable as well. My domain koffie.nu (coffee.now in Dutch), registered in '98, is still going strong. I just hope the rising sealevel won't wipe away the country any time soon.

Meer info over koffie zal in 1999 worden toegevoegd

Lies

Yep, never came to updating the site, it's my email/network domain. Maybe Imshould change the 1 into a 2 ;)

There are tons.

So many now, it’s opened up to at least like 100 or more words now.

DNS engineer here: it's the bane of my existence. Vanity TLDs were a cash grab for ICANN. They have made defensive domains a nightmare

I want to know more

Something like what I wrote in my other comment: https://lemmy.world/comment/6698854

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If you're on the country code, you open yourself up to risk. ml has been a risk before.

Your headline is misleading though. Taliban didn't kill it. Admin did.

Such a heinous click bait, I'm inclined to down vote the post. Definitely misleading af.

If the Taliban never got control of the .af domain in the first place. The Admin would have renew it. So the Taliban did kill it.

If the US hadn't pulled out, the Taliban wouldn't be in charge. So Trump killed it.

Indirectly doing things allows anyone to take the blame!

If the big bang had never occurred, queer.af would never have died.

Ergo: big bang killed queer.af.

QED

Lol did you forget who was President when we pulled out of Afghanistan?

Trump made the decision to pull out, Biden didn't stop what had already been set in motion.

He also didn’t execute it very well

Well, they run Afghanistan and af is the country code. They picked a domain that they thought was cute, funny or clever and didn't consider longevity or risk. It's on them. If I make a website. I won't pick a silly extension that won't survive long.

They could get a .ck domain instead and move to queer.as.fu.ck, no?

.ck is only available as subdomains - including the hilarious, co.ck.

Wouldn't that need them to get the fu.ck domain itself? I have a feeling that is already used by someone else, but there currently isn't any website at that domain (doesn't mean it isnt used)

Worst hypothesis they just need to mess around a bit. For example I don't think that queerasfu.ck would be registered.

Activitypub makes it next to impossible to "move" an instance to a new domain.

Every post/comment/and user is uniquely identified using the domain. In the eyes of ActivityPub changing the domain just makes each of those things a completely new thing.

You can set up a new service at your new domain and potentially get most all your users to migrate but they'll be leaving behind their entire histories and as a "new" fediverse user they'll only be discoverable via the historical posts for as long as the original server is reachable.

Yes, that was a big issue for fmhy.ml too

Damn, that's sad. Thank you for the info.

Thats IMO one of the worst engineering decisions in the protocol, besides all the others, but this one (making identity depend on domains, meaning on third parties antithetical to decentralization) is... laughable. Who was responsible for it?

But, the theory goes, you're not supposed to be reliant on third parties as you should be in control of your own domain (or within a few degrees of the person who is).

Large instances are what are antithetical to decentralisation.

Of course, the reality of it is that, it just hasn't worked out like that.

Not sure how well this would actually work, but couldn't the admins "copy" the instance to the new domain and then initiate an account migration from the old to the new instance for every account? That should both push out the account transfer to all the other instances and preserve the post history as well.

Is there no SAN equivalent for AP?