Kevin Beaumont (@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social)
mastodon.world
Attached: 1 image Queer.af mastodon instance has been shut down by the Taliban (not a joke, they seized the domain name). https://akko.erincandescent.net/notice/AenoDMPN0SdVXSq9ZY
  • ⓝⓞ🅞🅝🅔@lemmy.caEnglish
    1031·
    9 months ago

    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.

    🤷🏽‍♂️

    • Neshura@bookwormstory.socialEnglish
      57·
      9 months ago

      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.

    • FlumPHP@programming.devEnglish
      24·
      9 months ago

      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.

      • Lamedonyx@lemmy.worldEnglish
        30·
        9 months ago

        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.

          • JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyzEnglish
            22·
            9 months ago

            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.

            • barsoap@lemm.eeEnglish
              5·
              9 months ago

              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.

            • sleepmode@lemmy.worldEnglish
              3·
              9 months ago

              Interesting. I wonder if that has anything to do with why some companies started dumping them for regular TLDs.

        • PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.worldEnglish
          8·
          9 months ago

          Similarly, the .io TLD is for territories around the Indian Ocean. But for some reason, it became popular for cheap little flash-style games.

      • ⓝⓞ🅞🅝🅔@lemmy.caEnglish
        13·
        9 months ago

        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.

        • noobnarski@feddit.deEnglish
          5·
          9 months ago

          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.

    • marzhall@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      9 months ago

      From one of the admins:

      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.

    • ryannathans@aussie.zoneEnglish
      7·
      9 months ago

      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

      • ⓝⓞ🅞🅝🅔@lemmy.caEnglish
        4·
        9 months ago

        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.

  • ISometimesAdmin@the.coolest.zone
    8017·
    9 months ago

    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.

    • ryan@the.coolest.zone
      391·
      9 months ago

      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.

      • ISometimesAdmin@the.coolest.zone
        7·
        9 months ago

        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

      • phx@lemmy.caEnglish
        4·
        9 months ago

        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?

        • Natanael@slrpnk.netEnglish
          2·
          9 months ago

          Not in ActivityPub no.

          The main privacy/security issue is mostly mitigated by the fact that there’s a sync behavior for accounts and follows and distribution of content where the host can push revocation messages, triggering other servers to delete follows and wipe cached account data originating from that hosting server, which means that somebody who takes over a domain after a wipe can’t imitate the exact same accounts. But old links can still be redirected because there’s no way to verify what they were supposed to point to, so some degree of impersonation remains possible unless other servers agree to preemptively defederate…

    • Lmaydev@programming.devEnglish
      4·
      9 months ago

      Literally says domain in the title. Also says they seized the domain in the summary text below.

    • fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      9 months ago

      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.

      • TheEntity@kbin.social
        5·
        9 months ago

        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.

        • fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          9 months ago

          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.

    • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️@yiffit.netEnglish
      21·
      9 months ago

      Who’s bright idea was it to integrate the domain name itself directly into the software such that changing the domain name totally fucks up the whole thing? Is there actually a good reason for this to not work like any other website where the domain name is just an address and changing it doesn’t actually have any effect other than requiring users to type in or bookmark a different URL?

      • TheEntity@kbin.social
        2·
        9 months ago

        Federation combined with keeping the historical federated data consistent is certainly a bitch. We can’t have it all. It could be like email that only handles delivery at any point in time and history is purely local, but Mastodon specifically keeps the federated data public. Propagating the change on the historical data to the federated instances would be nearly impossible. I don’t see how it could have been done better without sacrificing something else.

  • Hootz@lemmy.caEnglish
    133·
    9 months ago

    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.

    • 7heo@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      9 months ago

      We (via the ICANN, see below) actually have the power to do that. The .af TLD only works because the root DNS servers delegate the .af TLD 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 ICANN’s scope) and which ones are generic (within ICANN’s 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.

      • barsoap@lemm.eeEnglish
        3·
        9 months ago

        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.

        • 7heo@lemmy.mlEnglish
          2·
          9 months ago

          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.

  • LEDZeppelin@lemmy.worldEnglish
    32·
    9 months ago

    As I was reading the title I was fully prepared to see one of the Republican states name in the end

    • angstylittlecatboy@reddthat.comEnglish
      5·
      9 months ago

      US states don’t have registrars (four cities do however) and even .us is pretty much only used for domain hacks vs. a lot of TLDs that are actually used to identify country (which I’ve seen a few people criticize Americans over, but while I don’t think it had anything to do with privacy as much as Americans just getting used to everything being .com, I think that’s ultimately a good thing.)

    • zoostation@lemmy.worldEnglish
      33·
      9 months ago

      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.

    • Stéphane Bortzmeyer@mastodon.gougere.fr
      81·
      9 months ago

      @i_have_no_enemies Almost every Internet activity start with a #DNS request. So, DNS is often (ab)used for political goals.
      Also, domain names are organized in a tree so if you control a domain (in that case .af), you also control all names underneath.
      There are social networks that don’t rely on the DNS but they have other issues. In the mean time, take DNS seriously and choose your domain name with care.

    • Ebby@lemmy.ssba.comEnglish
      6·
      9 months ago

      Still have to buy/register a domain name, and I’m assuming in this case, it’s through a particular organization that doesn’t like that kind of stuff.

      • i_have_no_enemies@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
        33·
        9 months ago

        domain is centralized and subject to a state power.

        is it possible to change that or any other workaround is available?

        • RobotToasterEnglish
          3·
          9 months ago

          OpenNic have been trying to fix it for a long time, but only people who use their DNS servers can access their domains.

          I use their DNS servers on philosophical grounds, but I have literally never come across someone using one of their exclusive domain names.

          • khorovodoved@lemm.eeEnglish
            3·
            9 months ago

            From what I understand, their own domains are not actually decentralized. Each of them has it’s own “authority” that can control what is or is not allowed to be registered. Emercoin domains look more promising, but I am not knowledgeable enough about them to say that they are actually decentralized. I would say that the closest thing to fediverse is DNS system in I2P, there different DNS providers federate with each other and share their records.

        • khorovodoved@lemm.eeEnglish
          1·
          9 months ago

          There are some projects to create decentralized DNS systems, but almost no one uses them, so if you try to use them than you limit amount of your potential users drastically.