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.
🤷🏽♂️
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.
💜
deleted by creator
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.
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.
We (via the ICANN, see below) actually have the power to do that. The.afTLD only works because the root DNS servers delegate the.afTLD to the Afghan nameservers. As soon as we stop doing that, they are powerless.And as a bonus, the ICANN could set the nameservers to OpenNIC’s, setting a precedent for a more public ownership of the Internet. But somehow I highly doubt they would ever do that…Edit: I did what I documented here to do, and here is the (automated) answer from the ICANN:
Dear [name],
Thank you for contacting ICANN Contractual Compliance.
Your complaint involved a domain name registered under a country code top-level domain.
Please note that ICANN has no contractual authority to address complaints involving country code top-level domains (ccTLDs), such as .us, .eu, .ac, or domain names registered under a ccTLD (e.g. example.us, example.eu, example.ac). ICANN does not accredit registrars or set policy for ccTLDs and has no contractual authority to take compliance action against ccTLD operators. For inquiries and issues involving ccTLDs, you may wish to contact the relevant ccTLD manager using the contact details at https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db. This page will also help you determine which top-level domains (TLDs) are country codes (outside of ICANNs scope) and which ones are generic (within ICANNs scope).
Please note that responses to closed cases are not monitored. Therefore, if you require future assistance or have any questions regarding this case that is being closed, please email compliance@icann.org. if you have a new complaint, please submit it at http://www.icann.org/resources/compliance/complaints.
ICANN is requesting your feedback on this closed complaint. Please complete this optional survey here.
Sincerely,
ICANN Contractual Compliance
Of course, the contact details at https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/af.html are the Afghan ministry contact information, so this is a no go.
And the IANA being managed by the ICANN, aside from electing to use alternative DNS servers, there isn’t much we can do.
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.
ICANN is going to become a UN agency before they kick out states as stakeholders.
You seem to be absolutely right. The conduct of the Afghan registry goes square against the ICANN base registry agreement, yet they won’t do squat against ccTLDs, as evidenced per the email I received (see my edit).
Thank you for your comment.
Not exactly a surprise. It was known it will happen ahead of time: https://archive.is/EaSjE
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.
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.
I thought they’d already shut down. Renaming isn’t an option, but you can at least direct your users to the new instance.
I figured they would have almost instantly gone read only and prepared the self destruction. But I guess they just closed off registration and set the self destruct pretty far out.
As I was reading the title I was fully prepared to see one of the Republican states name in the end
I’m pretty sure none of them control registrars
How tf did they seize it? isn’t mastodon instance federated? don’t the admins own it?
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.
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?
It’s got nothing to do with Mastodon—it’s the domain name system. If DNS doesn’t direct the request to the intended server, the server never sees it.
