• Flying Squid
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    144 months ago

    I’m simultaneously amused and appalled.

    The amusement is from the Taliban being so sensitive they can’t even allow a domain with ‘queer’ in the name to be associated with .af as if anyone anywhere outside maybe Afghanistan itself associates .af with Afghanistan.

    The reason I’m appalled should be obvious.

  • tygerprints
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    94 months ago

    I have to admit that I am Talibanphobic. I hate them, as I hate all small brained twits without balls. The more they hate gay people, the more gay people must infiltrate the spaces where they are and shit on them publically. We all should be as in their face and openly gay as is possible in their presence. Their small brains can only threaten our lives, but can never take our power or our spirits away.

    • @i_have_no_enemiesOP
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      -44 months ago

      as others have stated mastodon has no control over it

      unfortunately countries own the domain names

      • AmidFuror
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        44 months ago

        The commenter made a prehistoric beast joke. I felt it was a bit antiquated myself.

  • Kabaka
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    84 months ago

    I have two .af domain names that got suspended as well. I don’t even think they had a single DNS record set right now, but I had short-term plans for them. Oh well.

  • @[email protected]
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    34 months ago

    Firstly, the domain was seized, the instance remains though is effectively orphaned due to how instances work. You should change your title to “queer.af domain seized from mastodon instance by Taliban” to make things clearer.

    Secondly, you seem to be under the impression there’s some sort of way around this? A TLD controlled by a foreign government (whether you like it or not) retook a domain. It’s similar to the US having control of .us or Canada having control of .ca.

    So to make things fun, I’ll point out that yes, technically it is possible to “work around” the issue and keep the domain name. Notice I said, and stressed, the word “technically”. Because you likely have a better chance of Trump admitting to a crime and voluntarily going to jail than it happening.

  • @i_have_no_enemiesOP
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    -54 months ago

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

    • @yuriy
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      254 months ago

      They seized the domain, .af is the Afghanistan ccTLD.

    • @CaptainSpaceman
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      84 months ago

      Mastodon comments say its because they were using the Afghanistan TLD of .AF

      • @i_have_no_enemiesOP
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        -154 months ago

        yea but why did mastodon comply with their request to seize?

        what if they just deny them their request?

        • @[email protected]
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          164 months ago

          It’s got nothing to do with Mastodon. Mastodon did not “comply” because Mastodon has no say one way or the other.

          Where TLDs are associated with particular countries then the national registrar for that country controls who is allocated domains under it.

          Example: ‘.fr’ is associated with France and is controlled by a French organisation.

          ‘.af’ is similarly controlled by an Afghanistan organisation and they can choose to grant or revoke ownership of domains under that TLD however they like.

          The Mastodon instance will need to move to a new domain.

          • @i_have_no_enemiesOP
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            4 months ago

            since domain is centralized and subject to a state power.

            is it possible to change that or any workaround?

            • admiralteal
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              194 months ago

              The national top-level domains are MEANT to be controlled by their relevant nation-states. They are not intended to be part of vanity URLs.

              So there’s nothing to “fix” here. This is the system working as intended, basically.

              • @rdyoung
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                94 months ago

                This right here. I believe Vanuatu recalled all theirs not long ago. The average person can still register plenty of country tlds but if you do, be aware and ready for the day it gets recalled.

            • @[email protected]
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              54 months ago

              Some amount of centralisation in domain management is necessary, in order to agree who owns what.

              Devolving control of TLDs to respective nations was actually a GOOD idea because it means each country can operate those TLDs in a way that fits their needs, which is already much better than all global TLDs being operated by a single organisation.

              The main mistake is that queer .af chose to register a domain controlled by a government who was very likely to have problems with what they were using it for.

              Nowadays there are a large number of ‘new’ TLDs which are not nationally controlled and may be a better choice.

              • @rdyoung
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                34 months ago

                Countries only control the tlds that represent them, af for Afghanistan, co.uk (obvious) .us (obvious), etc. The rest like the standard com, net, info and the others recently added like taxi, xyz, vip, etc are controlled by icann.org. Plenty of country tlds are freely available for anyone to use but buyer beware, there is precedent for a country to pull those domains back and not let others use them anymore.

              • @i_have_no_enemiesOP
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                14 months ago

                another issue is migrating accounts losses post history.

                Is there really no way to keep post history with same instance new domain name?

            • @[email protected]
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              44 months ago

              This is the internet equivalent of choosing to open a gay bar in Kabul instead of San Francisco.

              There were plenty of safe spaces, they chose terribly.

            • @rdyoung
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              4 months ago

              The only ones subject to state power are the tlds that represent countries or states, counties, etc. The other tlds are controlled by another central body that isn’t connected to any country and it would take a judge ordering a seizure for a domain to be taken down.

              Basically if they had gone with any of the other shit ton of tlds that aren’t for a specific country they would still be up and running. I can’t say that I wouldn’t have grabbed that tld given the chance but knowing it was Afghanistan I wouldn’t have used that as my main domain.

        • @rdyoung
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          34 months ago

          That’s not how that works. Domains are registered and basically rented year by year from registrars and they seized it from them.

          Mastodon has nothing to do with it. Mastodon is like lemmy, anyone can run their own instance. For example I have a ton of domains, most notably to go along with my username I’ve “owned” rdyoung.info for like 20 years now. I could run my own instance and point that domain at it or the other ones I own.

        • originalucifer
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          -54 months ago

          the morons who registered teh domain, signed it over to the government ‘for safe keeping’ and then the government turned into the literal taliban.

          dont sign your domains over to some foreign power or youre gunna have a bad time

    • @[email protected]
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      54 months ago

      Probably something to do with .af being the domain for Afghanistan. Wouldn’t be the first country to seize something with their domain that they didn’t like.

    • @[email protected]
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      14 months ago

      From my limited knowledge of how lemmy works: The domain is integral to how it registers with the federation, as well as how an instance functions.

      • @rdyoung
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        34 months ago

        It’s also the weakest link in the chain. Tlds for countries can get recalled by said country or you can fuck up and miss a renewal or someone can get into the account that holds the registration and point it elsewhere or even transfer it to another registrar.

        • @[email protected]
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          4 months ago

          As a network admin dealing mostly with servers, routing, and VPNs, I mostly prefer statically addressed IPv4 as identifiers, but this also has issues as it’s at the mercy of the ISP… luckily for me my network is only addressed internally over VPN, so all of the ~2000 hosts for which I am responsible reside on the 172.16.0.0/13 address space, where I am the dictator and BOFH.

          • @rdyoung
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            34 months ago

            Yeah, that doesn’t work for something like this. Not only are ipv4s in short supply, we have domains for a reason. You can point your domain at any ip and users will have no problem finding you.

            I haven’t dug into the way lemmy works so I am not sure how one would go about having multiple domains pointed at the same instance. I should probably get my geek on and run one for myself (not in the mood to deal with everything that comes from running one that has a more than just me and anyone I decide to let in. I would think that you could have multiple domains just like torrent trackers and get people to give you a way to notify them if/when they need to use queer.xyz to log in instead of queer.af for example.

            • @[email protected]
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              4 months ago

              Yeah, I don’t remember where I was going with the above, to be honest. Probably expressing my distain for DNS as an operational requirement instead of a convenient option.

              I haven’t dug deeply myself either, but I don’t see why instances can’t connect together dynamically, independent from address or hostname, instead using key exchange to authenticate. FQDN being such an integral part of the functionality is a huge liability

              • @rdyoung
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                24 months ago

                On a private network, ip or even your own made up domains will work fine. Dns isn’t worse than ip and it’s actually a better option. Not only are ipv4 in extremely short supply, you run multiple websites/services off the same ip because of the shortage and the world hasn’t fully embraced 6 yet.

                Imagine giving out a ipv6 address to users or hell, putting even an ipv4 on a business card. I run my own livery and have a few domains around that, bookaride.vip looks better on a card than x.x.x.x.

                • @[email protected]
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                  4 months ago

                  That’s an example of an optional convenience, with which I have no problem.

                  Would any sensible person use DNS for accessing your site? Yes
                  When the amish take control of the .vip TLD in an effort to ban automotive transport, will you have to build the site up from scratch just because you give it a new domain? No.

                  I don’t remember the details, but there was a post ago made by an instance admin who could no longer use the domain name he has built his lemmy instance around, and (according to the comments, at least) that basically meant that he had to scrap everything and start over.

              • @[email protected]
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                14 months ago

                Dns also allows the sites and services to verify against trusted 3rd party to prove they’re who they claim to be. Also shit like CDN and whatnot