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

cyberplace.social

38 pointsluu10 comments

They registered a domain in Afghanistan, what did they think was going to happen?

Hopefully this was an exercise in burning money for comedic value.

They fully expected for it to get "talibanned"

https://twitter.com/edefic/status/1757110857949958429

Right, add to list of examples of the risks of using random ccTLDs as your domains just to get a cool looking branding. We've seen this a number of times. I do feel for them however.

Also, no big deal right? Ppl can just migrate their account to another mastodon instance and everything's cool? (not true, content doesn't go with them)

Related recent discussion about the .ai ccTLD (which isn't the same as this but anecdotes of ccTLD risks)

.ai website registrations are a windfall for tiny Anguilla

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39194477

If ccTLD is under control of groups like Taliban, and more instances like this surface, how likely it is for ICANN "revolt" and intervene in ccTLD operations and take over?

None.

I very much doubt they'd be stupid enough to do that. Where do you draw the line? Do you take control of the tlds of every country that is not, in your view, democratically legitimized? Just the ones that don't share your values? Terrible idea, no thanks.

I think the ccTLD .af is in control of a group like the Taliban, because Afghanistan is in control of a group like the Taliban [1]. What exactly would the ICANN revolt about? Who should govern country code TLDs? Should the .us TLD be seized when the Project 2025/Agenda47 republicans run the US[2,3]? Can we get Library Genesis and Pirate Bay with .us TLD then?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_code_top-level_domain [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025 [3] https://www.donaldjtrump.com/agenda47 [*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_and_survei...

That's tragic and very, very funny. Excellent addition to my 2024 screenshot collection.

To be fair that was a great domain for the task

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