Bulletins and News Discussion from February 12th to February 18th, 2024 - The Prodigal Failson - COTW: Brazil

The Mastodon instance “queer.af” was effectively shut down by the Taliban, which has begun to operate Afghanistan’s “.af” top level domain after years of inactivity.

When the Taliban retook control of Afghanistan in 2021, the fate of these domains and the websites on them became uncertain, and, three years later, another shoe now appears to be dropping. Last month, Erin Shepherd, the administrator of the queer.af Mastodon instance on the Fediverse posted that they have been “in limbo” since the Taliban retook control of the country, and had already planned to shut down in April. The Taliban shut the domain down roughly two months before it was scheduled to renew.

“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,” a message signed by Afghanistan’s Ministry of Communications and IT, which is operated by the Taliban, reads.

queer.af was “a Mastodon instance for those who are queer or queer-adjacent who would like a more pleasant social media experience,” the instance’s description reads.

One particularly interesting quirk of the internet has always been the widespread use of country-level Top Level Domains (TLDs) by people and companies not actually in those countries. For years, “.tv,” which is administered by the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, was responsible for roughly 1/12th of the country’s gross national income, for example. Afghanistan’s TLD is “.af,” which worked well for anyone wanting to append “as fuck” to their domain.

“Until late last year, the .af registry had effectively ceased to exist, leaving everything in a state of limbo,” Shepherd wrote in a post last month announcing that queer.af was planning to shut down in April. “More recently, however, the registry has begun to operate again. Unfortunately, this is not really good news: this means it is now under the control of the Taliban government of Afghanistan.”

From “a practical perspective, this means that the present government has a desire to exert control over the country’s top level domain, and from an ethical and legal perspective this means that domain-related fees are now directed to the Taliban,” they added. “In light of this, the queer.af domain name (which expires on the 13th of April) will not be renewed. Because fediverse software does not support domain migrations, the queer.af instance must therefore close as a consequence.”

On Monday, Shepherd got the email from the Taliban, stating that it would shut down queer.af immediately. Shepherd said other .af domains registered by the domain registrar Gandi also got the same message, which suggests that there may be a wider purge of .af domains at the moment. Gandi did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“I made the proactive decision to shut things down upon it becoming clear that it wouldn't be practical (or, potentially, ethical!) to renew the domain. I assumed at the time that the domain would probably last until its expiration date; I wasn't expecting it to be terminated early,” Shepherd told me in an email.

queer.af was originally registered by a friend of Shepherd’s in April 2018 and became a Mastodon instance in July 2018: “It was a bit of an experiment—to see what kind of community one could create with exclusively ‘friend of a friend’ invites—it turned out it was a very nice one!,” they said, adding that a friend bought it “because it was neat, without a plan for it.

“We were very much aware that the .AF TLD belonged to Afghanistan and that there were potential upsets in the future,” they added. “In some strange ways, that made it more appealing —we knew that there were ways that this community experiment could end that were outside of our control, and not just due to us burning out or similar.”

Shepherd, a coder who contributes to various Fediverse projects, has migrated their own account to Akkoma, which is interoperable with Mastodon but has a handful of differences. The experience has highlighted that, while individual user accounts can be easily ported to other instances on the ActivityPub protocol, which Mastodon and Akkoma use, server instances cannot be. “Personally, I'm enjoying that I now get to revisit decisions we made 5 years ago. Mastodon was very much the right choice then for various reasons; but it's not my ideal ActivityPub implementation.”

They added that they will not be rebuilding queer.af elsewhere. “I've decided it's time for me to retire from that, for the time being at least. It'll be nice to be able to exist as just a user, not a representative of a community, where I can be a bit more relaxed knowing that things I do can't blow back on other people,” they said. “The community is mostly handling it pretty well; the vast majority of users have already found new homes. I still follow most of the users and still intend to keep in touch with them.”

The news has become quite notable on the Fediverse. One post I particularly liked: “no centralised social network could ever produce ‘the taliban deleted my account.’ that's a mastodon special.”