queer.af

» see queer.af as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

queer.af was a Mastodon server that went up in July 2018 and stayed deliberately small. You could not sign up for it. The about page, captured by the crawler on 9 August 2018, says plainly that to make an account you needed to be referred by an existing member, and lists fifteen of them. Erin Shepherd administered it from the account @embr. The server description was a passage lifted from the Bee Movie script. Solemn it was not.

The name was the whole joke. Read it as English and it is a sentence about the people on it. Read it as DNS and the last two letters are the country-code top-level domain for Afghanistan, which in 2018 was a cheap and underused string that plenty of people had noticed looked like slang. Domain hacks of this kind were everywhere in the late 2010s, on .io and .ly and .tv and .af, and almost nobody using one spent much time thinking about whose delegation they were borrowing.

Then in August 2021 the Afghan government fell, and the registry came with it. The Ministry of Communications and Information Technology is a real office with a real building, and whoever runs the ministry runs the zone. Shepherd wrote that the server had been in limbo ever since, and had already settled on 12 April 2024 as its closing date, chosen because that was when the domain came up for renewal and renewing meant paying the Taliban. Nobody at queer.af shut queer.af down. A registry stopped publishing its name. Those two sentences are not the same sentence, and the gap between them is the whole of this grave.

~ the case file ~

~ what the ministry sent ~

The notice was short and almost bureaucratic in its politeness. "queer.af has been suspended in the registry and will no longer be included in zone file generation," it read. "This means that any services connected with this domain, such as websites or email addresses will cease working shortly." It was signed by the ministry. 404 Media published the story on 12 February 2024; the homepage stops appearing in the Wayback Machine after 4 February 2024 at 17:35 UTC, with nothing afterward. The window between those two timestamps is where the server died.

No account here, and no referral was ever heading my way. This grave is in the archive for the mechanism, and the mechanism is something anyone who has ever registered a domain should look at directly. A country code is lent, not sold. Turkey runs .tr through a university department and has its own opinions about who gets a name under it; every other two-letter string on the internet answers to a government somewhere, including the ones that got marketed as cute.

~ fifteen accounts ~

The scale is worth saying out loud because it argues against the usual way these stories get told. This was not a platform. At the only point where the numbers are legible it had fifteen people on it, gated behind a referral to software that anyone can install for themselves. The loss was not measured in users. It was measured in the fact that a small group of people had built something under a name that turned out to belong to a government which jails people for being them.

~ what happened to the rest of .af ~

queer.af was not alone in the zone. Reporting at the time found that .af domains registered through Gandi had been cut off as a group, which made the suspension look less like a targeted act of censorship and more like what happens when a dormant registry is picked back up and run by people with a list. Both readings end in the same place for the people who lost the name.

The fediverse absorbed it the way the fediverse absorbs everything, unevenly. Accounts that had migrated kept their followers and the rest did not, because Mastodon's account-move feature needs the old server to still be answering when you use it, and this one stopped answering with no notice. Today a DNS lookup for queer.af comes back empty. Being dropped from zone file generation leaves behind no 404 and no holding page. The name stops existing as far as any resolver is concerned.

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