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Queer.af mastodon domain has been seized by the Taliban (mastodon.world)

submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[-] [email protected] 102 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

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.

🤷🏽‍♂️

[-] [email protected] 57 points 5 months ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 27 points 5 months ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago

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

[-] [email protected] 30 points 5 months ago

You never know when the Luxembourgish taliban will take over.

[-] [email protected] 18 points 5 months ago

NOONE EXPECTS THE LUXEMBORGIAN TALIBAN!

[-] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago

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

[-] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

Stupid sexy Taliban!

[-] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

We are ready to reunite Luxembourg any day now, better get ready to move to the be tld.

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[-] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

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.

https://kbin.social/m/random/p/4648694/To-the-people-who-are-like-What-did-you-expect

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[-] [email protected] 24 points 5 months ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 30 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

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.

[-] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago

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

[-] [email protected] 22 points 5 months ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

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.

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[-] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

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

[-] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

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.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

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.

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[-] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

From one of the admins:

To the people who are like “What 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.

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[-] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago

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

[-] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

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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[-] [email protected] 64 points 5 months ago

OP, this title is stupidly misleading and incorrect, you should change it immediately.

The Taliban seized the DOMAIN, aka the ownership of the queer.af name that people could type into their browsers, and their system would resolve into an IP address.

As the Taliban control Afghanistan, (see where the domain comes from), this was inevitable and the instance owners were already planning to retire the instance as they didn't want to give money to the Taliban to keep it up.

The INSTANCE, aka the physical server, was not in Afghanistan, and still has its IP address(es), and so has had absolutely nothing happen to it.

[-] [email protected] 38 points 5 months ago

Unfortunately, I think due to the way ActivityPub works, the domain name is inexorably tied to the instance. Trying to migrate to a new domain name would break a lot of federation to my understanding.

It looks like someone posted an attempt at a workaround here (latest reply): https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/5774

But it does require the self-destruct button because the old domain name has to be erased from other servers.

[-] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Yep, the other workaround that's elsewhere in this thread is to set up an entry with a different authoritative DNS in the hosts file, allowing a single machine to resolve the old domain manually.

This could be part of a greater effort, basically asking other instances to help the users evacuate the instance and transfer their accounts, before running tootctl self-destruct

[-] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

Does federation involve some sort of key exchange? If not, would that mean that if one loses control of a domain somebody could spin up a new Lemmy instance to spoof the old one and potentially harvest data?

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[-] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Literally says domain in the title. Also says they seized the domain in the summary text below.

[-] [email protected] 33 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Ah, af for Afganastan not "as fuck".

[-] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago

I suppose that depends on your point of view.

[-] [email protected] 26 points 5 months ago

Any chance they rebrand to queerasfu.ck?

[-] [email protected] 24 points 5 months ago

I think queer.fr would be an awesome domain name too

[-] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

I mentioned on Mastodon the domain name "queersare.us" (parody of Toys R Us I guess) which actually makes use of the United States' ccTLD that barely gets used. Someone pointed out to me exactly why that's the case and it has something to do with scammers.

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[-] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago

how many times is this going to get posted

[-] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago

FWIW, this is the first time I'm reading this. I'll allow it.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

As many times as possible because it's funny af

[-] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

seizes your comment in taliban

[-] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago

Not exactly a surprise. It was known it will happen ahead of time: https://archive.is/EaSjE

[-] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

I thought it already happened when I first saw that post. I'm surprised they didn't try to figure something else out and kill it sooner.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

I don't think they could do anything about it. As far as I know, Mastodon doesn't support any kind of instance renaming, so the hostname is one thing you cannot change. You can only spin up a completely new instance.

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[-] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago

If only we could just tell everyone living in the dark ages they get no say in anything if their say is shitting on someone they don't like.

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[-] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

[email protected]

I nearly broke my neck from the double take on that title lol.

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this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2024

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