The ‘Queer.af’ instance of Mastodon, an open source social media platform, disappeared on Monday along with many other domains and websites after the Taliban regime suddenly decided to take control of domain servers in Afghanistan.
Although the .af extension is meant to evoke two very different words that sound interesting when added to an adjective like “queer,” .af is actually the top-level domain extension of the Afghan nation.
The U.S.-backed Afghan government was overthrown by the Islamic militant Taliban after President Joe Biden’s failed withdrawal in 2021. After an incredibly long period of time, the Taliban regime finally seems to have realized what foreigners are using .af domain names for.
monday the verge Quote Website administrators said the Taliban initially issued fairly generous notices about domain closures, but then changed their minds and began shutting them down without further notice.
Erin Shepard, the instance administrator and main developer of ActivityPub, said she had already planned to “shut down” rather than update in April, but the early termination came as a surprise. told the media. An email from Afghanistan’s Ministry of Communications and IT posted by Sheppard said that the query.af domain had been suspended and that the website and emails associated with it would “soon cease to function.” 404 wrote that the instance had been in place since July 2018 as a place “for gay or near-gay people who want a more comfortable social media experience.”
In another post, Shepherd said all .af domains acquired through the Gandi domain registrar have been shut down, citing inet.af as one of them. We have reached out to Gandi for confirmation and for further information, but at this time, according to a message on Gandi.net, the registrar is unable to register, renew, transfer, or restore .af domain names. It is said that he has not been there. According to Internet Archive captures, the site had already stopped accepting new domain extension registrations by October 2020 and disabled renewals by November of last year.
The Verge compared this situation to the much happier situation in tiny Tuvalu, which was making huge profits by selling access to “.tv” domains to TV-centric websites.Actually Tuvalu acquisition Licensing domains to foreign website operators accounts for about one-twelfth of total gross national income (GNI). Tuvaluan authorities retrospectively compared receiving the .tv Internet extension in 1995 to winning the global lottery.
The Taliban clearly do that. do not have That’s how I feel about Afghanistan’s “.af” domains.
Queer.af administrator found humor With the discontinuation of the website:
Yes, we were aware of the possibility of an outage from the beginning. Yes, we were aware that the political situation could change. But it’s fun to criticize conservative dictators, even as a small form of protest… We’ve all heard funny stories from this.
Some Mastodon users responded that Queer.af has been paying the Taliban for domain registrations since the fall of Kabul, but they don’t think this is a good way to “stick your nose to a conservative dictator.” Ta. Some were surprised that the pre-Taliban Afghan government was not exactly LGBTQ-friendly, but it allowed Queer.af to continue operating for so long.
