Seems like this is less a “shut down by the Taliban” situation and more of a “we’re choosing to stop paying registry fees that would have started going to the Taliban for a domain I had gifted to me a few years ago.” Silly to have created a .af domain in the first place when this was a foreseeable turn of events, but maybe a bit more understandable.
In July 2018, me and three friends were chatting in my flat in London. One of them mentioned that they had a fun domain they had no idea what to do with. That domain, of course, is queer.af, and the rest, as they say, is history. We invited our friends and let them invite their friends, and that’s how things have operated here ever since.
Since the fall of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan in 2021, that fate of that domain has fallen into question; until late last year, the .af registry had effectively ceased to exist, leaving everything in a state of limbo. The Council of Country Code Administrators [cocca.org.nz] (CoCCA), who were contracted to operate the TLD, continued to operate things as-is, although eventually turned off all operations but automatic renewals.
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. As an additional complication, the registry operators have wiped the existing list of accredited registrars and replaced them with 21 new organizations.
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.
Timelne
Now: User registration has been completely disabled.
2024-04-12: The instance will be instructed to self destruct (sending delete activities for all accounts to all known instances)
An archive of the database and user media will be retained for at least a further 3 months in order to support user exports. It will be deleted by 2025-04-12 at the latest.
Questions and Answers
What actions should I take? Please take the following three months to setup an account on another instance and migrate, and to export all of your posts and following lists.
Will there be a successor instance? Maybe. I haven’t reached a decision as to whether to run a new multi-user instance or retire to a single user instance yet. It is likely that if I start a successor instance, it will be running software other than Mastodon; the software landscape has changed since 2018. If I do start one, every queer.af user will receive an invite.
Any other plans? One project I’ve been contemplating for 2024 is offering managed instance hosting to friends, open source projects, and similar. If you’re a user of queer.af or a friend who would be interested in that (and in particular in beta-testing it), drop me a message.
Finally, thank you to every user of queer.af, past and present, for being here. You’ve been a wonderful userbase, and it has been (almost all of the time) a pleasure to be your host
Seems like this is less a “shut down by the Taliban” situation and more of a “we’re choosing to stop paying registry fees that would have started going to the Taliban for a domain I had gifted to me a few years ago.” Silly to have created a .af domain in the first place when this was a foreseeable turn of events, but maybe a bit more understandable.
From January 10 2024,
Sources,
https://web.archive.org/web/20240205181615/https://wedistribute.org/2024/01/queer-af-is-shutting-down-due-to-taliban/
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/46e100de-c885-4772-842a-150be8e714e3.jpeg