That’s an old story, and if I remember correctly the title was misleading, it was more of a decision of the instance admins to not renew it rather than the Taliban having anything to do with it
this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
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Yeah, they didn't want their money going to the Taliban, and it's a little shaky as to whether the Taliban's Ministry of IT would take a stricter content enforcement on their ccTLD. For a while, it was only possible to renew domains, not buy new ones.
Still, I stuck with the title because the Taliban is still the reason.
the misleading title you are remembering was closer to “queer.af is shutting down, killed by the taliban”
It's more like just because you can make a funny domain name out of a specific top level domain like .af Make sure some country doesn't have dibs on it first.
Like it wouldn't be smart to start a business selling che Guevara merch at comra.de.
Why would Germany of all places ban a shop selling Che Guevara merch?
I think the point is politics in a nation can change at any time, and as such you may lose the domain/no longer feel safe supporting that nation. Just because they wouldn't now doesn't mean they wouldn't in the future. (Especially with how well AfD is polling and how much CDU/CSU seem to be starting to cooperate)
How are non-ccTLDs, like .com any safer? A fascist like Trump could decide to nationalize managing them at any time
I think "funny" names involving TLDs as a whole just need to be more careful. It should never be what you expect.
Like, if someone from the US told me to go a website called "comrade" to buy merch, I'd expect comrade.com. To get me to go to their intended address they'd need to be a German telling me to go to "comra". That's utterly unintuitive as far as verbal communication goes.
You buy both and link from the .com
I hope no country has dibs on .rodeo
I should found xxxistan.
That sucks but it's also funny because it's a pun.
Can we stop for a minute and appreciate the fact that to this day, a queer community uses domain of freaking AFGHANISTAN? :D
That by itself is based, although yeah, registrar fees issues are real.
Unfortunately in the fediverse changing your domain isn't really possible. You basically have to start over.
It's technically possible, just really, really hard. One example of a successful migration was the transition from calckey.social to firefish.social. It was a massive, extremely difficult undertaking, though.
A big problem involves how user identities are tied to instances. If there were a way to decouple that, I think a lot of the pain goes away.
Firefish devs actually took the time to code hostname migration into their software, however.
That aspect seems to be particularly lacking in most Fediverse software.
People change domains all the time right? Isn't it just a matter of reconfiguring your servers to recognise the new domain provider and address?
From what I understand due to the way that Lemmy handles federation, it doesn't (currently?) have a way to handle an instance changing its domain name and still being able to communicate or even an individual user changing their instance and retaining their comments/votes/etc... (this might be more ActivityPub limited since the way Mastodon does it still seems pretty hacky and just a work around for underlying issues).
From a website perspective, yeah, just change some settings and you're good to go and accessible on the web, but that doesn't mean that anything regarding Lemmy is going to actually work.
Sadly, it's more complicated in the Fediverse, because Actor identities are tied to specific domains. If a user moves accounts, they basically send out an update that says "this profile is dead, follow this new account instead", and users automatically switch upon receiving it.
There are three problems:
- If your server goes down before you initiate this switch, the change can't actually federate out to your followers. You basically have to build up your follower list from ground zero.
- Mass migration is slow, spammy, and inefficient. If we had thought to incorporate some kind of decentralized identifier and relied on that, rather than
@[email protected], switching your account to something else could theoretically be more seamless. - Doing this for hundreds or thousands of users is not only a headache, but can be a real strain on servers. It's one thing when a single person does this switch for 3,000 followers: the update is gradually trickled out across accounts, and after a while, the new account is at parity. Doing this with thousands of accounts with thousands of followers is extremely painful.
In a similar fashion, it would be great to find a way to migrate your post history, not just your followers, between one service and another. So far it's possible to request a backup, but only a few services allow importing said backup, let alone import a backup from a different provider (so far only Firefish, Pixelfed and its derivatives allow for the latter).
That green pixel tho. I know it's not the point at all, but I can't unsee it.
when you're so queer you can't even get your flag straight smh
Actually, that's probably my fault, I had to edit the graphic on a phone, and don't have the steadiest hands.
I'll fix it when I get home.
Its just occurred to me that the pride flag is a bunch of STRAIGHT lines. I am amused.
Domain hacking is fun, but politics isn't fun. Bit.ly got taken over by the Libyan government agency, FMHY.ml also had to start over after Malian government stopped Freenom from giving out free domains.
So many companies will be at the mercy of Anguilla
and a few to tuvalu and in by extension the sea
I believe they are moving. Paid for in some part by .tv