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.”

Repression against Muslims has increased in the run-up to India's elections in April and May. The scene of the latest violence against the country's largest minority is the northern state of Uttarakhand. It is ruled by the Indian People's Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is aiming to secure a third term in office in the upcoming vote.

On Thursday last week, the administration of the city of Haldwani razed a mosque with an attached Koran school to the ground with bulldozers. Apparently it was built on state property despite the lack of approval. However, the legal issue is still being heard by the highest court in Uttarakhand. When angry residents tried to prevent the demolition, emergency services used live ammunition against them, leaving five people dead. A state of emergency was declared over Haldwani. Police entered Muslim homes, attacked family members, including women, demolished property, and captured several men.

When a journalist from the news site Scroll.in visited Haldwani at the weekend, emergency services denied him access to the Muslim-inhabited Banbhoolpura district. Nevertheless, he went in and found locked houses and destroyed vehicles, while the residents no longer dared to go out on the streets. Many have already fled to other states.

Bulldozing the mosque is not the only anti-Muslim move by the Uttarakhand government. According to dpa, a law was passed in the state one day before the mosque was demolished, which, on the one hand, makes the cohabitation of unmarried people dependent on whether they receive official approval. On the other hand, it does not prohibit polygamy, which was previously permitted for Indian Muslims, for other Indians. The thrust is clear: under the motto “equal rights for all” the aim is to create a mood against Muslims. At the same time, legal options are created to take action against them.

This is not new in India. Rather, it has long been the recipe for success of Modi's Hindu nationalists, especially before elections, to turn the country's different population groups against each other and at the same time present themselves as defenders of the rights of the Hindu majority. This had already worked perfectly in 2002, when Modi was still Chief Minister of the state of Gujarat and allowed pogroms against Muslims to take place for weeks, whereupon he emerged as the radiant winner of the election at that time.

However, a polarization of the population and depoliticization of the election campaign is urgently needed this year. Farmer protests are currently being revived in India, as they completely paralyzed the metropolis of Delhi a few years ago. In India, too, fueling so-called ethnic or religious conflicts is a proven means of defusing and diverting legitimate social protest.

The anti-fascist, NATO-compliant pseudo-radicalism of this hedonistic scene is increasingly repelling young leftists, who are now also joining forces in communist groups in Leipzig. As the “avant-garde of the day before yesterday,” the newspaper ND – the week now defamed “authoritarian” organizations such as Communist Construction (KA) or Young Struggle – with the obligatory accusation of anti-Semitism.

The left-wing state parliament member Juliane Nagel - patron saint of the "anti-German" scene based in the Connewitz district - is cited as the key witness against the Marxist-Leninists. These groups wanted to build a communist party, they acted in a non-transparent manner and tried to take over issues, for example in the course of tenant protests, warns Nagel. There is – oh horror – a “revival of class struggle motifs” to be seen. The KA network must be made more transparent, the politician is quoted in a long version of the ND article in Kreuzer Leipzig. Everyone must become aware that there are leading figures at work and that some of them are “front groups” in which the KA background is invisible.

This sounds a lot like an application letter from Nagel, who in 2021 called for “traditional anti-imperialism” to be subjected to a “general criticism” and to adopt left-wing peace policy based on GDR traditions, to the domestic secret service “Verfassungsschutz”.