2y ago

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

archive.fo /EaSjE

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

63 comments

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.
  
  No. The Admins killed the Instance.
  
  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
- 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.
  
  There are tons.
  
  So many now, it’s opened up to at least like 100 or more words now.

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

That’s quite an intentionally misleading headline @hal_5700X@lemmy.world

Booooo misleading title

Why would you want to use .af TLD anyway?
- They almost certainly picked it just for the joke.
  queer.af = Queer AF = Queer as fuck!
  It's like how popular the TLD of Guernsey (.gg) is with gaming websites.
  I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't even realize what country code the TLD was when they registered it.
  
  Same with Twitch.tv, the .tv apparently being the country code for Tuvala.

New domain name proposal:
queer.asf.uk 🤭

What a bad taste title
- What a bad taste title
  For who...The Taliban?
  
  That it's objectively false to stir up attention
  Your title implies it was directly killed, when it factually was not.

They could have renewed it just for the irony. Even if it means giving some money to the Taliban.
- funding oppression of women for the luls

63 comments