@GossiTheDog Just a reminder to folks; the ability to move your posts from one instance to another has been an open request for over four years now for Mastodon (LOOOOOONG convo):
@GossiTheDog Yeah, that doesn’t help you if your server out of the blue just vaporizes.*
OTOH, IIRC the queer.af folks warned that this could be coming.
*Well, some of us are paranoid and download our user data on a monthly(if I remember) basis. 😂
@GossiTheDog yea, people should not consider country TLDs as 'safe' to use. They are under the jurisdiction of their respective countries, so if they're not friendly to LGBT+ folk, it comes as no surprise that they'd eventually shutdown a domain like queer.af. They should have assumed this would happen eventually.
"Seized the domain name" may be overstating it. .af is the country code top-level domain for Afghanistan (much as .tv is for Tuvalu). The Afghan government has control over who can use that cc-TLD & they've changed the rules.
Now, of course, it's the *%W# Taliban, so it's not like they are going to be in any way sympathetic to… anything… but it is their ccTLD.
Since you can actually buy a TLD now (new & kinda breaks the hierarchical nature of the DNS…), just buy .asfuck.
@JRFreeman@GossiTheDog the content is still there, the servers probably weren't hosted in Afghanistan.
It's as simple as purchasing a new domain name, updating your certs, changing some server settings (to reference the new domain in generated links) and sending an email to your users with the new domain in it.
Like, this is actually one of those things in IT that doesn't have a lot of hidden complexity: the process I described is the whole process.
@GossiTheDog@b4ux1t3@JRFreeman that's a mastodon bug, and not in scope for this discussion. The idea that a domain couldn't be contested is some pretty privileged-ass nonsense, as are many design decisions made by the people who created mastodon.
@GossiTheDog@b4ux1t3@JRFreeman there absolutely fucking well was that presumption because this issue simply could not arise in the absence of that presumption.
@GossiTheDog@davidfetter@JRFreeman Hold on, am I understanding correctly that it's not hard requirement of mastodon, just. . ."they haven't gotten to it yet"?
If so, my original point stands, with the addition of "Mastodon has to implement basic functionality that even my own personal crappy websites support" ;)
@GossiTheDog Yeah, I get that, I already edited my post to make it clear that I know it's not that "easy". Sorry, I realized the tone could be mistaken a bit too late.
@GossiTheDog@b4ux1t3@JRFreeman haven't tried it but if you installed a second instance on the same machine and used either /etc/hosts or did manual DNS entries upstream the new instance should see the old one resolving as the correct url (it would be none the wiser) and you could possibly allow users to run a server migration.
@GossiTheDog@aral This is why I have always found it weird that people create domains in Libya, Tuvalu, Afghanistan, and all the other national two-letter TLDs that have some “cute” meaning in English.
@Martoni@GossiTheDog "af" is a gen z abbreviation for "as fuck", as in "queer as fuck". Unabashed, badass... but unfortunately they probably did not think through the TLD ownership concerns. I think Gandi even surfaces some of these new TLDs as suggested when other options like "queer . com" were unavailable (not sure about .af specifically though). Lots of sites now use ".io" (British Indian Ocean territories, used because of "input-output") and ".tv" (Tuvalu, used because of "television")
Just so y'all know, most of those two-letter TLDs like .af refer to countries. In this case, Afghanistan. The country itself is the owner of that TLD and can decide who can and cannot use it. That's how TLDs were set up long ago and I see nothing wrong with it.
So think before using one. In all cases you have to to ask yourself two questions before using it. 1) Might my content offend that country? 2) Do I want to appear to be aligned with that country?
This second one has puzzled me for years. I see two-letter country TLDs on websites that, in my opinion, clearly shouldn't be aligning themselves with that country.
Bottom line: understand these two-letter TLDs and think before using them.
@matthewskelton@GossiTheDog Sadly this seems to be a thing a lot of people miss, I see a lot of commentary framing this as a Taliban specific issue, which in reality isn't. A lot of TLDs have specific requirements, and the country coded ones are often a lot more specific. In THIS case it's a Taliban issue, but it could just as well have been a domain being removed because the owner lives in the wrong place.
queer.af has been suspended in the registry
and will no longer be included in zone file
generation. This means that any services
connected with this domain, such as
websites or email addresses will cease
working shortly.
Please contact your registrar if you have any
questions about this process. Your registrar's
details are as follows:
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