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Queer.af mastodon instance has been shut down by the Taliban (not a joke, they seized the domain name).
https://akko.erincandescent.net/notice/AenoDMPN0SdVXSq9ZY
It’s got nothing to do with Mastodon. Mastodon did not “comply” because Mastodon has no say one way or the other.
Where TLDs are associated with particular countries then the national registrar for that country controls who is allocated domains under it.
Example: ‘.fr’ is associated with France and is controlled by a French organisation.
‘.af’ is similarly controlled by an Afghanistan organisation and they can choose to grant or revoke ownership of domains under that TLD however they like.
The Mastodon instance will need to move to a new domain.
This right here. I believe Vanuatu recalled all theirs not long ago. The average person can still register plenty of country tlds but if you do, be aware and ready for the day it gets recalled.
Some amount of centralisation in domain management is necessary, in order to agree who owns what.
Devolving control of TLDs to respective nations was actually a GOOD idea because it means each country can operate those TLDs in a way that fits their needs, which is already much better than all global TLDs being operated by a single organisation.
The main mistake is that queer .af chose to register a domain controlled by a government who was very likely to have problems with what they were using it for.
Nowadays there are a large number of ‘new’ TLDs which are not nationally controlled and may be a better choice.
Countries only control the tlds that represent them, af for Afghanistan, co.uk (obvious) .us (obvious), etc. The rest like the standard com, net, info and the others recently added like taxi, xyz, vip, etc are controlled by icann.org. Plenty of country tlds are freely available for anyone to use but buyer beware, there is precedent for a country to pull those domains back and not let others use them anymore.
The only ones subject to state power are the tlds that represent countries or states, counties, etc. The other tlds are controlled by another central body that isn’t connected to any country and it would take a judge ordering a seizure for a domain to be taken down.
Basically if they had gone with any of the other shit ton of tlds that aren’t for a specific country they would still be up and running. I can’t say that I wouldn’t have grabbed that tld given the chance but knowing it was Afghanistan I wouldn’t have used that as my main domain.
That’s not how that works. Domains are registered and basically rented year by year from registrars and they seized it from them.
Mastodon has nothing to do with it. Mastodon is like lemmy, anyone can run their own instance. For example I have a ton of domains, most notably to go along with my username I’ve “owned” rdyoung.info for like 20 years now. I could run my own instance and point that domain at it or the other ones I own.
Probably something to do with .af being the domain for Afghanistan. Wouldn’t be the first country to seize something with their domain that they didn’t like.
It’s also the weakest link in the chain. Tlds for countries can get recalled by said country or you can fuck up and miss a renewal or someone can get into the account that holds the registration and point it elsewhere or even transfer it to another registrar.
As a network admin dealing mostly with servers, routing, and VPNs, I mostly prefer statically addressed IPv4 as identifiers, but this also has issues as it’s at the mercy of the ISP… luckily for me my network is only addressed internally over VPN, so all of the ~2000 hosts for which I am responsible reside on the 172.16.0.0/13 address space, where I am the dictator and BOFH.
Yeah, that doesn’t work for something like this. Not only are ipv4s in short supply, we have domains for a reason. You can point your domain at any ip and users will have no problem finding you.
I haven’t dug into the way lemmy works so I am not sure how one would go about having multiple domains pointed at the same instance. I should probably get my geek on and run one for myself (not in the mood to deal with everything that comes from running one that has a more than just me and anyone I decide to let in. I would think that you could have multiple domains just like torrent trackers and get people to give you a way to notify them if/when they need to use queer.xyz to log in instead of queer.af for example.
Yeah, I don’t remember where I was going with the above, to be honest. Probably expressing my distain for DNS as an operational requirement instead of a convenient option.
I haven’t dug deeply myself either, but I don’t see why instances can’t connect together dynamically, independent from address or hostname, instead using key exchange to authenticate. FQDN being such an integral part of the functionality is a huge liability
On a private network, ip or even your own made up domains will work fine. Dns isn’t worse than ip and it’s actually a better option. Not only are ipv4 in extremely short supply, you run multiple websites/services off the same ip because of the shortage and the world hasn’t fully embraced 6 yet.
Imagine giving out a ipv6 address to users or hell, putting even an ipv4 on a business card. I run my own livery and have a few domains around that, bookaride.vip looks better on a card than x.x.x.x.
That’s an example of an optional convenience, with which I have no problem.
Would any sensible person use DNS for accessing your site? Yes
When the amish take control of the .vip TLD in an effort to ban automotive transport, will you have to build the site up from scratch just because you give it a new domain? No.
I don’t remember the details, but there was a post ago made by an instance admin who could no longer use the domain name he has built his lemmy instance around, and (according to the comments, at least) that basically meant that he had to scrap everything and start over.
I don’t know lemmy architecture well enough to say this with 100% certainty, but the reasoning is probably something along the lines of that every user is identified by email -like name such as hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com, you’d need to rename each user to retain their posts and comments…
Then you need to somehow make other instances trust that you’re who you claim to be, and they should overwrite the data as you say, to prevent conflicts or double comments from 2 different names.
Then you get to communities, fed/defed lists, what else
This would require some great engineering to solve rather stupid instance admin mistake…
You should threat TLD owner as a root of trust, and queer trusting Taliban sounds shit
You just lost all credibility here. If you think that the world could operate on ip alone, do us all a favor and stick to running private networks because the world has enough fuckery on the net as it is.
The amish are never going to take over .vip, not only because they loathe tech but because they have no claim on it and you lacking that understanding of how things works is why you lost all credibility here. Please stop posting.
You don’t have to rebuild anything around a normal website if you lose or change domains. If lemmy/mastodon really requires anything more than some simple configuration changes and letting the users know how to access the instance, that’s an issue that needs addressed. I wouldn’t be surprised if it is possible to use multiple domains and then do like rarbg does and run multiple mirrors under a fixed base domain with the current alts listed for easy access.
It appears as though despite me being decades out of practice building and running my own servers and sites, I know more about this than you do. I’ll repeat, do yourself a favor and stop trying to help.
How tf did they seize it? isn’t mastodon instance federated? don’t the admins own it?
They seized the domain, .af is the Afghanistan ccTLD.
Mastodon comments say its because they were using the Afghanistan TLD of .AF
yea but why did mastodon comply with their request to seize?
what if they just deny them their request?
It’s got nothing to do with Mastodon. Mastodon did not “comply” because Mastodon has no say one way or the other.
Where TLDs are associated with particular countries then the national registrar for that country controls who is allocated domains under it.
Example: ‘.fr’ is associated with France and is controlled by a French organisation.
‘.af’ is similarly controlled by an Afghanistan organisation and they can choose to grant or revoke ownership of domains under that TLD however they like.
The Mastodon instance will need to move to a new domain.
since domain is centralized and subject to a state power.
is it possible to change that or any workaround?
The national top-level domains are MEANT to be controlled by their relevant nation-states. They are not intended to be part of vanity URLs.
So there’s nothing to “fix” here. This is the system working as intended, basically.
This right here. I believe Vanuatu recalled all theirs not long ago. The average person can still register plenty of country tlds but if you do, be aware and ready for the day it gets recalled.
Some amount of centralisation in domain management is necessary, in order to agree who owns what.
Devolving control of TLDs to respective nations was actually a GOOD idea because it means each country can operate those TLDs in a way that fits their needs, which is already much better than all global TLDs being operated by a single organisation.
The main mistake is that queer .af chose to register a domain controlled by a government who was very likely to have problems with what they were using it for.
Nowadays there are a large number of ‘new’ TLDs which are not nationally controlled and may be a better choice.
Countries only control the tlds that represent them, af for Afghanistan, co.uk (obvious) .us (obvious), etc. The rest like the standard com, net, info and the others recently added like taxi, xyz, vip, etc are controlled by icann.org. Plenty of country tlds are freely available for anyone to use but buyer beware, there is precedent for a country to pull those domains back and not let others use them anymore.
another issue is migrating accounts losses post history.
Is there really no way to keep post history with same instance new domain name?
This is the internet equivalent of choosing to open a gay bar in Kabul instead of San Francisco.
There were plenty of safe spaces, they chose terribly.
The only ones subject to state power are the tlds that represent countries or states, counties, etc. The other tlds are controlled by another central body that isn’t connected to any country and it would take a judge ordering a seizure for a domain to be taken down.
Basically if they had gone with any of the other shit ton of tlds that aren’t for a specific country they would still be up and running. I can’t say that I wouldn’t have grabbed that tld given the chance but knowing it was Afghanistan I wouldn’t have used that as my main domain.
That’s not how that works. Domains are registered and basically rented year by year from registrars and they seized it from them.
Mastodon has nothing to do with it. Mastodon is like lemmy, anyone can run their own instance. For example I have a ton of domains, most notably to go along with my username I’ve “owned” rdyoung.info for like 20 years now. I could run my own instance and point that domain at it or the other ones I own.
the morons who registered teh domain, signed it over to the government ‘for safe keeping’ and then the government turned into the literal taliban.
dont sign your domains over to some foreign power or youre gunna have a bad time
Probably something to do with .af being the domain for Afghanistan. Wouldn’t be the first country to seize something with their domain that they didn’t like.
From my limited knowledge of how lemmy works: The domain is integral to how it registers with the federation, as well as how an instance functions.
It’s also the weakest link in the chain. Tlds for countries can get recalled by said country or you can fuck up and miss a renewal or someone can get into the account that holds the registration and point it elsewhere or even transfer it to another registrar.
As a network admin dealing mostly with servers, routing, and VPNs, I mostly prefer statically addressed IPv4 as identifiers, but this also has issues as it’s at the mercy of the ISP… luckily for me my network is only addressed internally over VPN, so all of the ~2000 hosts for which I am responsible reside on the 172.16.0.0/13 address space, where I am the dictator and BOFH.
Yeah, that doesn’t work for something like this. Not only are ipv4s in short supply, we have domains for a reason. You can point your domain at any ip and users will have no problem finding you.
I haven’t dug into the way lemmy works so I am not sure how one would go about having multiple domains pointed at the same instance. I should probably get my geek on and run one for myself (not in the mood to deal with everything that comes from running one that has a more than just me and anyone I decide to let in. I would think that you could have multiple domains just like torrent trackers and get people to give you a way to notify them if/when they need to use queer.xyz to log in instead of queer.af for example.
Yeah, I don’t remember where I was going with the above, to be honest. Probably expressing my distain for DNS as an operational requirement instead of a convenient option.
I haven’t dug deeply myself either, but I don’t see why instances can’t connect together dynamically, independent from address or hostname, instead using key exchange to authenticate. FQDN being such an integral part of the functionality is a huge liability
On a private network, ip or even your own made up domains will work fine. Dns isn’t worse than ip and it’s actually a better option. Not only are ipv4 in extremely short supply, you run multiple websites/services off the same ip because of the shortage and the world hasn’t fully embraced 6 yet.
Imagine giving out a ipv6 address to users or hell, putting even an ipv4 on a business card. I run my own livery and have a few domains around that, bookaride.vip looks better on a card than x.x.x.x.
That’s an example of an optional convenience, with which I have no problem.
Would any sensible person use DNS for accessing your site? Yes
When the amish take control of the .vip TLD in an effort to ban automotive transport, will you have to build the site up from scratch just because you give it a new domain? No.
I don’t remember the details, but there was a post ago made by an instance admin who could no longer use the domain name he has built his lemmy instance around, and (according to the comments, at least) that basically meant that he had to scrap everything and start over.
I don’t know lemmy architecture well enough to say this with 100% certainty, but the reasoning is probably something along the lines of that every user is identified by email -like name such as hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com, you’d need to rename each user to retain their posts and comments…
Then you need to somehow make other instances trust that you’re who you claim to be, and they should overwrite the data as you say, to prevent conflicts or double comments from 2 different names.
Then you get to communities, fed/defed lists, what else
This would require some great engineering to solve rather stupid instance admin mistake…
You should threat TLD owner as a root of trust, and queer trusting Taliban sounds shit
You just lost all credibility here. If you think that the world could operate on ip alone, do us all a favor and stick to running private networks because the world has enough fuckery on the net as it is.
The amish are never going to take over .vip, not only because they loathe tech but because they have no claim on it and you lacking that understanding of how things works is why you lost all credibility here. Please stop posting.
You don’t have to rebuild anything around a normal website if you lose or change domains. If lemmy/mastodon really requires anything more than some simple configuration changes and letting the users know how to access the instance, that’s an issue that needs addressed. I wouldn’t be surprised if it is possible to use multiple domains and then do like rarbg does and run multiple mirrors under a fixed base domain with the current alts listed for easy access.
It appears as though despite me being decades out of practice building and running my own servers and sites, I know more about this than you do. I’ll repeat, do yourself a favor and stop trying to help.
You have a nice day now.
Dns also allows the sites and services to verify against trusted 3rd party to prove they’re who they claim to be. Also shit like CDN and whatnot