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?
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
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.
> 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 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
This comment deserves some kind of prize for simultaneous display of surface support for women's rights together with a breathtaking level of casual misogyny.
And you saw it all nonetheless :) I have a bit of an impostor syndrome given HN’s high brow public but this is cluedo-master level. At least there is a prize.
If that were seriously attempted, China and Russia would likely seize the opportunity to set up their own competing DNS root zone, completely beyond American control, and dozens of countries around the world would sign up for it. The global DNS root might suddenly splinter into two.
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