Queer.af is Shutting Down, Due to Taliban
Queer.af is Shutting Down, Due to Taliban
Mastodon instance Queer.af is shutting down because the country that provides the domain is now ruled by the Taliban.
When registering a country code domain, keep in mind where the domain is being registered. A shift in government or geopolitics can have serious consequences.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
@deadsuperhero
What a good report!