Queer.af, a popular Mastodon server for the queer community, has announced an end-of-service date for an unexpected reason: .af is Afghanistan’s top-level domain, and the country is now ruled by the Taliban.

Historically, the .af domain has been operated by the Council of Country Code Administrators, an independent New Zealand-based organization that supports 55 different country code domains. However, the registry experienced service disruption in 2021, shortly after the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan fell.

…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.

Queer AF Postmaster Announcement

As a result, the Queer.af admin team has decided not to renew their domain for a variety of reasons, including the Taliban’s hostile actions towards queer Afghan citizens. It also remains in question whether the 21 newly appointed organizations for Afghanistan’s domain registry will enforce new restrictions on the TLD.

Sadly, instances cannot be easily transferred from one domain to another without a massive amount of effort, so the instance itself can’t default to another domain. The admin team remains undecided about whether to create a successor instance, but is considering the possibility.

For the time being, they have advised users to invest the next three months to migrate to a new server. Queer.af shuts down on April 12th, 2024.