Queer.af mastodon instance has been shut down by the Taliban

Comments

• GlassHalfHopeful@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨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.

  🤷🏽‍♂️

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  • flumph@programming.dev ⁨9⁩ ⁨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.

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    • Lamedonyx@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨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 public funding of the country.

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    • GlassHalfHopeful@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Yeah, this is most probably true.

      Honestly though, I don’t even know what most of the genetic 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.

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  • marzhall@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨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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    • GlassHalfHopeful@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      💜

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  • ryannathans@aussie.zone ⁨9⁩ ⁨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

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    • GlassHalfHopeful@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨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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  • Aatube@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    It says AF. I rest my case

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• ISometimesAdmin@the.coolest.zone ⁨9⁩ ⁨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.

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  • ryan@the.coolest.zone ⁨9⁩ ⁨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.

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    • ISometimesAdmin@the.coolest.zone ⁨9⁩ ⁨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.

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    • phx@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨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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  • Lmaydev@programming.dev ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Literally says domain in the title lol

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• Tarkcanis@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Ah, af for afganastan not “as fuck”.

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  • c0c0c0@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I suppose that depends on your point of view.

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• joyjoy@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Any chance they rebrand to queerasfu.ck?

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  • rockSlayer@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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

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  • rhebucks-zh@incremental.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    No, since profanities are generally frowned upon in serious website domains.

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    • TheSpookiestUser@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      sh.itjust.works would like a word

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    • RobotToaster@mander.xyz ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      QueerAsSu.ch doesn’t have the same ring to it, but they’ll be safe unless the gnomes of Zurich come for them.

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    • joyjoy@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      queerasfri.ck?

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  • Resol@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨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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• nutsack@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  how many times is this going to get posted

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  • dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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

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  • SRo@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    As many times as possible because it’s funny af

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    • PutangInaMo@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      seizes your comment in taliban

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• Hootz@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨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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  • 7heo@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    We (the ICANN) actually have the power to do that. The .af TLD only works because the root DNS servers delegate the .af TLD to their nameservers. As soon as we stop doing that, they are powerless.

    And as a bonus, they could set the nameservers to opennic’s, setting a precedent for a more public ownership of the internet. But somehow I highly doubt the ICANN would ever do that…

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    • barsoap@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      ICANN is going to become a UN agency before they kick out states as stakeholders. Their status, though, is not derived from that but by silent agreement from the ISPs handing out servers following ICANN’s root servers as default, they’d have to fuck up quite badly for that institutional inertia to change, and any replacement on that level is absolutely bound to respect ccTLDs as control over their own ccTLD is a national security issue for all states, and push come to shove they’d legislate that domestic ISPs have to hand out servers that respect at least their own ccTLD.

      And there’s nothing wrong with that. Plenty of letter combinations to choose from especially now that there’s vanity domains. If this was the early 2000s e.g. lemmy.world would simply be lemmy.net.

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• TheEntity@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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

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  • fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨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.

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    • TheEntity@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨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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  • Kolanaki@yiffit.net ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Who’s bright idea was it to integrate the domain name itself directly into the software such that changing the domain name totally fucks up the whole thing? Is there actually a good reason for this to not work like any other website where the domain name is just an address and doesn’t actually have any effect other than requiring users to type in or bookmark a different URL?

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    • TheEntity@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Federation combined with keeping the historical federated data consistent is certainly a bitch. We can't have it all. It could be like email that only handles delivery at any point in time and history is purely local, but Mastodon specifically keeps the federated data public. Propagating the change on the historical data to the federated instances would be nearly impossible. I don't see how it could have been done better without sacrificing something else.

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• Caligvla@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  !nottheonion@lemmy.world

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

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• i_have_no_enemies@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  How tf did they seize it? isn’t mastodon instance federated? don’t the admins own it?

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  • zoostation@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Ultimately each country makes the rules for domains under its top level, for those that are named for the country, like .af for Afghanistan. Everything about the instance is intact and can be moved to a different domain.

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    • bortzmeyer@mastodon.gougere.fr ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      @zoostation @i_have_no_enemies Indeed, choosing .af was a bad idea for a LGBT service. But there are other bad choices (people registering names under .social without reading the fine print, which says, among other things, that some lobbies can easily take down domain names)
      https://www.eff.org/fr/node/96673

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    • i_have_no_enemies@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      yea found a fix by someone else as well

      Stéphane Bortzmeyer @bortzmeyer@mastodon.gougere.fr

      @GossiTheDog Since the authoritative name servers still reply; you can also ask the #DNS resolver administrator to forward requests for queer.af to kiki.bunny.net and coco.bunny.net.

      did not know they can control domain names,

      is it possible to deny them that request? why did maston comply with them?

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  • bortzmeyer@mastodon.gougere.fr ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    @i_have_no_enemies Almost every Internet activity start with a #DNS request. So, DNS is often (ab)used for political goals.
    Also, domain names are organized in a tree so if you control a domain (in that case .af), you also control all names underneath.
    There are social networks that don't rely on the DNS but they have other issues. In the mean time, take DNS seriously and choose your domain name with care.

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• LEDZeppelin@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  As I was reading the title I was fully prepared to see one of the Republican states name in the end

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  • Aatube@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I'm pretty sure none of them control registrars

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  • angstylittlecatboy@reddthat.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    US states don’t have registers and .us is pretty much only used to spell words vs. a lot of TLDs that are actually used to identify country (which I’ve seen a few people criticize Americans over, but while I don’t think it had anything to do with privacy as much as Americans just getting used to everything being .com, I think that’s ultimately a good thing.)

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