Queer.af Mastodon instance has been shut down by the Taliban | Hacker News Reader

Queer.af Mastodon instance has been shut down by the Taliban

akko.erincandescent.net

I feel like a lot of the comments in here could be answered by this post: https://akko.erincandescent.net/notice/AeoVF2zhNHj6LrNXto

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

was it worth giving money to a country that would rather see queer people dead? this directly as well, and if not even in significance of a sum, but just out of principle?

> But thumbing your nose at conservative autocrats as an even minor form of protest is fun

Owning conservative autocrats by giving them my money

That’s why you don’t use ccTLDs for vanity domains. The only ccTLD you should ever use is your own country TLD, otherwise stick with gTLDs, ideally .com or .net.

Does Mastodon have an features to transition domain names? It seems it's be useful to have a configurable backup that the system pushes out that can also be used if the primary is unavailable. Ideally with a way to inform federated systems of the switch

Users can migrate instance (thereby changing the domain their account is hosted from).

This, however, requires that the server they are migrating TO can resolve the domain of the instance they are migrating FROM.

I am unaware of any "whole instance" redirecting.

What did they expect ?

Not sure what they were expecting.

A bit like registering anti-ccp with a Chinese TLD.

Shouldn't be shocked when it gets pulled.

you mean, like registering anti-ccp domain before ccp comes to power, eh?

Bad analogy: the previous Afghanistan government was also anti-LGBT, albeit less extremely so - the previous government’s Penal Code, introduced in 2018, criminalises homosexuality and punishes it with imprisonment. When the Taliban took over, they announced that imprisonment is now replaced with death

Yeah, except imagine you registered it in a region where ccp-like government comes in power on a regular basis, and even without them in power, it is not exactly an LGBT-friendly place.

To be clear, I am not trying to say that CCP is in any way similar to Taliban, because it isn’t. Was just trying to demonstrate the lack of foresight happening here using your own hypothetical scenario.

What were they supposed to do? It was fine for years until the botched withdrawal. Changing a domain name in a federated system is tricky business.

not using afghanistan as TLD for a queer forum. Even if the Talibans didn't get back in power, it wasn't a country very LGBT friendly to put it mildly, so it was very risky for a long term instance to use it for TLD

I’ve heard Kabul is one of the gayest places in the world. The presumption is you are gay until proven otherwise.

Not the same thing as being LGBTQ+ friendly. Torture and executions is pretty LGBTQ+ hostile.

But interesting how extreme homophobia and widespread homosexuality coexist.

This is fascinating. I feel like you're serious but I don't understand. does anyone have a source about this gay-but-not culture in Kabul?

https://www.scotsman.com/news/world/startled-marines-find-af...

That’s rural Afghanistan, not Kabul. “Taliban Shuffle” by Kim Barker is entertaining and relevant.

> It was fine for years until the botched withdrawal.

The previous government made gay sex a crime. Their seeming tolerance wasn’t because they were LGBT-friendly, it was because they were too busy fighting a losing battle against the Taliban to have time for enforcing their own anti-LGBT laws and policies. If they’d survived, they quite possibly would have made the same decision at some point

Not a joke, the TLD was .af. As reported by Kevin Beaumont https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/111918422459442548

Unrelated to the topic content-wise, but what's the link format? Like, with the object identifier ...

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