The “Queer.af” instance of the open-source social media platform Mastodon disappeared on Monday, along with many other domains and websites, because the Taliban regime abruptly decided to take control of Afghanistan’s domain servers.
The .af extension is meant to evoke two entirely different words that sound amusing when appended to adjectives like “queer,” but in truth, .af is the top-level domain extension for the nation of Afghanistan.
Afghanistan’s U.S.-backed government was overthrown by the Muslim extremists of the Taliban following President Joe Biden’s botched withdrawal in 2021. After a surprisingly long interval, the Taliban regime appears to have finally noticed what foreigners were using .af domain names for.
The Verge on Monday quoted website administrators who said the Taliban initially gave fairly generous notice about shutting domains down, but then changed its mind and started pulling plugs without further notice:
Erin Shepherd, the administrator of the instance and key ActivityPub developer, told the outlet they were already planning “to shut things down” instead of renewing in April, but that the early termination was a surprise. An email from the Afghanistan Ministry of Communications and IT that Shepherd posted said that the queer.af domain had been suspended and that websites or emails connected with it “will cease working shortly.” The instance had been in place since July 2018, 404 writes, as a place “for those who are queer or queer-adjacent who would like a more pleasant social media experience.”
Shepherd said in another post that all .af domains acquired through the Gandi domain registrar had been shutdown, mentioning inet.af as one. We’ve reached out to Gandi to verify and to ask for more information, but at the moment, a message on Gandi.net says that the registrar is no longer registering, renewing, transferring, or restoring .af domain names. Internet Archive captures show the site had already stopped taking new registrations for the domain extension by October 2020 and disabled renewals of it by November of last year.
The Verge compared this situation to the much happier state of affairs in tiny Tuvalu, which made a great deal of money by selling access to its “.tv” domain to television-centered websites. In fact, Tuvalu gets about 1/12th of its entire Gross National Income (GNI) by licensing its domain to foreign website operators. Tuvalu officials retrospectively compared receiving the .tv Internet extension in 1995 to winning a global lottery.
The Taliban clearly does not feel that way about Afghanistan’s “.af” domain.
The Queer.af administrators found some humor in the demise of their website:
Yes, we were aware of the possibility of suspension from the start. Yes, we were aware that political circumstances could change. But thumbing your nose at conservative autocrats as an even minor form of protest is fun… We’ve all gotten a fun story out of this.
Some Mastodon users replied that Queer.af has been paying money to the Taliban for domain registration ever since the fall of Kabul, which does not seem like a good way to “thumb your nose at conservative autocrats.” Others marveled that the pre-Taliban government of Afghanistan, which was not exactly LGBTQ-friendly, allowed Queer.af to continue operating for as long as it did.
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