This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
π€·π½ββοΈ
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? π± Will Luxembourg disappear overnight?
You never know when the Luxembourgish taliban will take over.
NOONE EXPECTS THE LUXEMBORGIAN TALIBAN!
The fact that pornhub is HQβd in Luxembourg leads me to believe this will be some sort of sexy taliban
Stupid sexy Taliban!
We are ready to reunite Luxembourg any day now, better get ready to move to the be tld.
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
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.
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.
To the people who are like βWhat did you expect to happen when you picked a .af domain, are you idiots?β
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 Iβll continue to help anyone who remains) Weβve all gotten a fun story out of this
Iβve 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.
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.
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.
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
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?
Literally says domain in the title. Also says they seized the domain in the summary text below.
Ah, af for Afganastan not "as fuck".
I suppose that depends on your point of view.
Any chance they rebrand to queerasfu.ck?
I think queer.fr would be an awesome domain name too
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.
how many times is this going to get posted
FWIW, this is the first time I'm reading this. I'll allow it.
As many times as possible because it's funny af
seizes your comment in taliban
Not exactly a surprise. It was known it will happen ahead of time: https://archive.is/EaSjE
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.
