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Queer.af mastodon domain has been seized by the Taliban
(mastodon.world)
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this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2024
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How tf did they seize it? isn't mastodon instance federated? don't the admins own it?
Ultimately each country makes the rules for domains under its top level, for those that are named for the country, like .af for Afghanistan. Everything about the instance is intact and can be moved to a different domain.
@zoostation @i_have_no_enemies Indeed, choosing .af was a bad idea for a LGBT service. But there are other bad choices (people registering names under .social without reading the fine print, which says, among other things, that some lobbies can easily take down domain names)
https://www.eff.org/fr/node/96673
yea found a fix by someone else as well
did not know they can control domain names,
is it possible to deny them that request? why did maston comply with them?
It’s got nothing to do with Mastodon—it’s the domain name system. If DNS doesn’t direct the request to the intended server, the server never sees it.
That's not how it works... the .af domain is reserved for use by Afganistan by ICANN and the government of Afganistan is the Taliban. Same with the commies on .ml which is reserved for Malaysia.
Everything else correct. But ml is actually Mali. my is Malaysia.
Dammit. The whole thing is basically absurd though because these letters mean fuckall in Afghanistan, Mali, and Malaysia and I think URLs can even have unicode now, though idk about tlds
To be fair, I didn't know ml was Mali, I had to look that up. But I did know Malaysia was my, which was what prompted me to look ml up.
There are tons of tlds with arbritrary unicode characters
@i_have_no_enemies @zoostation Maston? You mean Mastodon? The software did not "comply", it just issues regular DNS requets and the domain name servers for .af now reply NXDOMAIN (No Such Domain) for queer.af.
See https://catnip.article19.org/ (or @b0rk zines).
@i_have_no_enemies @zoostation @b0rk By the way, there is a #DNS client on the fediverse, @DNSresolver See for instance https://mastodon.gougere.fr/@bortzmeyer/111919725507892158 to see a query and the answer.
@i_have_no_enemies Almost every Internet activity start with a #DNS request. So, DNS is often (ab)used for political goals.
Also, domain names are organized in a tree so if you control a domain (in that case .af), you also control all names underneath.
There are social networks that don't rely on the DNS but they have other issues. In the mean time, take DNS seriously and choose your domain name with care.
Still have to buy/register a domain name, and I'm assuming in this case, it's through a particular organization that doesn't like that kind of stuff.
domain is centralized and subject to a state power.
is it possible to change that or any other workaround is available?
Doubt it. Top level domains by country code were created explicitly for this purpose... for use by and to be managed by the corresponding state.
Wikipedia rabbit hole:
OpenNic have been trying to fix it for a long time, but only people who use their DNS servers can access their domains.
I use their DNS servers on philosophical grounds, but I have literally never come across someone using one of their exclusive domain names.
From what I understand, their own domains are not actually decentralized. Each of them has it's own "authority" that can control what is or is not allowed to be registered. Emercoin domains look more promising, but I am not knowledgeable enough about them to say that they are actually decentralized. I would say that the closest thing to fediverse is DNS system in I2P, there different DNS providers federate with each other and share their records.
There are some projects to create decentralized DNS systems, but almost no one uses them, so if you try to use them than you limit amount of your potential users drastically.
it will be useful for websites that are intentionally made to be accessible to a small minority