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Posted by Tiberium 4 hours ago

Telegram's t.me domain has been suspended(www.whois.com)
225 points | 154 comments
sebastiennight 3 hours ago|
Of course we launched our Telegram channel just this weekend, so I am feeling pretty happy that I enforced a 15-year old SOP that says "never email links to 3rd-party domains ; always use a redirect"...

Swapping the redirect now for telegram.me, which hopefully won't go down simultaneously

ars 3 hours ago||
I would do something that isn't *.me, since it was them that suspended it.
walrus01 2 hours ago|||
.is might be a choice, since archive.is continues to be available despite many legal threats

You don't have to be an Icelandic national to register a .is

pixel_popping 2 hours ago||
.is is a very resilient TLD indeed, and it's well known in some communities.
arikrahman 42 minutes ago|||
It's a pretty good heuristic if some of the more targeted communities choose a TLD and stay up for some time.
mfkp 54 minutes ago||||
how about .to? that's what i'm mainly using for my url shortener/redirects and haven't run into any issues... yet
ButlerianJihad 45 minutes ago||
How about using a gTLD that is not subject to the whims of geopolitics and unstable island nations?

I think it is class-A stupid for whole swaths of the Internet to be depending on these "micronations" who are prostituting themselves for a quick buck. Some perhaps don't even profit from selling these domains, but they suffer years down the road from the reputation hit or the grueling demands of providing a service to people who don't live there and have no interest in the actual success, or even survival, of these nations.

It is hilarious and ironic that people are nitpicking on GoDaddy themselves, when GoDaddy is a perfectly stable and legitimate registry/registrar; GoDaddy is a normal American business based in America and doing business that benefits American citizens, rather than some random banana republic.

These ccTLDs are always a gimmick, and they should be avoided by anyone who is serious about stability, resilience, or organizational reputation on the Internet.

walrus01 41 minutes ago|||
> American business based in America and doing business that benefits American citizens, rather than some random banana republic.

This makes a huge presumption of rock solid stability of political/economic system, that America is not going the direction of a banana republic, in terms of graft, corruption and patronage, which it certainly seems to be these days.

dragonwriter 30 minutes ago|||
“Banana republic” is specifically a term referring to countries that are puppets of the United States on behalf of commercial interests (the trope-naming example being Gautemala on behalf of United Fruit Company); in the absence of an imperial power pulling US strings on behalf of that powers’ commercial interests which dominated the US economy, it would be hard for the US to be reasonably described as going the direction of a “banana republic”.

What it is more going the way of a major power resenting a weakened position in the world falling into authoritarian and/or kleptocratic nationalist dictatorship leaning on the propaganda of restoring national greatness, somewhere between Hitler’s Germany and Putin’s Russia, which is a very different situation than a banana republic.

gnabgib 16 minutes ago|||
No.. that's not specifically it at all.

> dependent on exporting a single product or commodity, often controlled by foreign-owned entities [0]

Such countries/regions long existed before the US, although the term was coined by a US writer (William Sydney Porter), and the Banana industry (specifically) has a lot to answer for (in the US specifically). A region making money from.. foreign-owned chips, oil, IT-consultants or Sardines has the same status. The term has a terrible history (surprising the Gap hasn't rebranded).

[0]: https://www.britannica.com/topic/banana-republic

echoangle 22 minutes ago|||
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic

Banana republic isn’t specific to US control and it’s actually not that unreasonable to call Russia a banana republic

ButlerianJihad 37 minutes ago|||
Being an American citizen, I prefer to do business with American entities, regardless of what shitty opinion her detractors may express. I am loyal to her, more loyal than I would be to Tonga, or Montenegro, just to choose some random examples.
walrus01 35 minutes ago||
I don't think you're wrong that tiny pacific island nations are not stable or reliable, at this point they're all either a client state of China, the USA or Australia.

But I think it's also unfair and mean spirited to say that a country like Nauru (barely a country, IMHO, population of 12500 people) is "prostituting" itself by allowing 3rd party registrars to sell domains for a profit, since they have basically no other resource with the bird guano originated phosphate mines now being stripped clean. Would I use a Nauru domain? No. Do I go out of my way to insult them on the internet? Also no.

shishcat 23 minutes ago||
Btw, I highly doubt Nauru makes much money selling their ccTLD, they manage it directly on the island and each domain costs a whopping 500$/year.

Better examples: Tuvalu (.TV), Anguilla (.AI)

Both of these countries only get a cut of the money from the domains; all the technical management is done by GoDaddy for .TV and Identity Digital for .AI. In my opinion, very sad.

.AI was run by a local guy in Anguilla (Vince Cate) utilizing the https://cocca.org.nz/ domain SaaS, but Identity Digital took over in late 2024.

shishcat 29 minutes ago||||
Interesting read from 2004: https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2004/12/20/we-were-sold-...

But I strongly disagree with your conclusion. gTLDs are also run by profit-driven companies and operate under ICANN's US-rooted system. ccTLDs at least offer some jurisdictional autonomy and diversity.

And many "trendy" ccTLDs are not actually run by unstable local governments. .me, for example, is operated with GoDaddy and Identity Digital, while .to relies on Tucows, a Canadian company.

So the irony is that these ccTLDs often end up controlled or technically managed by the same North American companies you consider more trustworthy. Very few small/island countries actually manage their ccTLD directly, which is extremely sad.

naturalmovement 23 minutes ago|||
Didn't the crustacean site temporarily lose its domain a minute ago because someone had to make an in-person payment to whatever Serbian mafia controls .rs?

Vanity domains are beyond stupid and not worth the trouble.

floam 1 hour ago|||
isis
esseph 1 hour ago||
ospf-vs-is.is
lbotos 2 hours ago|||
I think you misunderstood -- OP is running op-s-domain.com/telegramchat -> redirect t.me.

They updated op-s-domain.com/telegramchat -> redirect telegram.me.

cmeacham98 2 hours ago||
I think you also misunderstood, they are suggesting OP redirect to a telegram domain that isn't on the .me TLD, as the other .me is potentially at risk of also being taken down.
fn-mote 27 minutes ago|||
This is barely an issue… changing the redirect is instantaneous.
lbotos 1 hour ago|||
fair enough -- dunno what domains telegram uses
essentia0 47 minutes ago||
telegram.dog
grayhatter 3 hours ago||
I appreciate the idea, I'll happily adopt your SOP, seems pretty useful

thanks

water-data-dude 3 hours ago||
You can read an explanation of the status codes on the icann website.

The explanation for clientRenewProhibited was interesting:

"This status code tells your domain's registry to reject requests to renew your domain. It is an uncommon status that is usually enacted during legal disputes or when your domain is subject to deletion."

Similar language for some of the other statuses like serverDeleteProhibited.

https://www.icann.org/epp#clientRenewProhibited

ivanmontillam 3 hours ago||
But if you check the domain's expiration date, it's far away in year 2035.

To the best of my knowledge, a domain can only be renewed in advance for up to 10 years.

(that could be the reason for that status).

chrisweekly 2 hours ago||
(2035 is less than 10 years from now)
ivanmontillam 2 hours ago||
(Yes, but it expires at 2035-05-20. If you count years by rounding up to integers, there's not enough time room to renew it an additional year. It would make it 11 years.)
shishcat 3 hours ago|||
I think they just flagged all locks in their admin portal. Like this: https://imgur.com/a/zoTQbwn
michalpleban 2 hours ago||
The status that actually says the domain is suspended is serverHold.
jonchurch_ 8 minutes ago||
Came to say this, ICANN says:

“This status code is set by your domain's Registry Operator. Your domain is not activated in the DNS.”

Also the serverDeleteProhibited status is active, which ICANN also admits is a weird and rare one:

“This status code prevents your domain from being deleted. It is an uncommon status that is usually enacted during legal disputes, at your request, or when a redemptionPeriod status is in place.”

https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/epp-status-codes-2014-...

RJSquirel 2 hours ago||
I can't believe they use GoDaddy as a registrar.
Brushfire 1 hour ago||
insanity. it almost undercuts everything they do.
sneak 18 minutes ago|||
Wait until you hear that the chats aren’t end to end encrypted.
zuzululu 1 hour ago|||
i think it makes perfect sense if you understand what telegram is and which country it benefits
gruez 58 minutes ago||
Since when did registars care about the political positions of its clients? They could have registered on cloudflare or namecheap and I doubt they'd bat an eye. Telegram is mainstream enough that nobody is going to cancel them, unlike kiwi farms or 4chan.
culi 57 minutes ago||
Clue me in? Is GoDaddy particularly censorial as a registrar?
lgats 40 minutes ago|||
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3381822 still holding Godaddy's support for SOPA against them
stavros 53 minutes ago||||
GoDaddy is just a general clusterfuck of arbitrary decisions. I don't have anything ready offhand to point to, but the general consensus is that you should avoid GoDaddy pretty vehemently.
mplewis 55 minutes ago|||
they're particularly incompetent
anigbrowl 2 hours ago||
Telegram is currently the target of legal/regulatory investigations by Russia (alleged extremism), France (likewise), and India (alleged facilitation of national exam leaking/cheating). I'm guessing the latter since it's the most recent and arguably has the most fiscal heft.

Also very surprised to see Telegram was reliant on GoDaddy, notorious for its lack of transparency.

ilaksh 2 hours ago||
But Telegram hasn't engaged in that, some of their users have.

I think the issue might be that although Telegram has a lot of abuse takedown activity, they do not permit access or direct action by authorities. If I recall, they have reiterated many times that some level or types of messages always remain private.

Maybe that's the issue is that a lot of illicit activity is going on in private channels and whether or not their filtering addresses it at all, authorities see the activity and have no access for court cases or direct action against it, so they can imagine it is quite rampant.

anigbrowl 1 hour ago|||
I'm not making an argument about who's right or whether these disputes have any merit, I'm just trying to guess who might have had the inclination and legal resources to make this happen.
kajman 2 hours ago||||
I always figured telegram got the screws turned on them all the time because their lack of E2E encryption meant it was viable to demand they proactively police the platform in the first place. Maybe Signal would just be outright blocked in these locales if it was anywhere near as popular, though.
inigyou 36 minutes ago|||
They generally don't have to proactively police it, but they have to answer court orders in every country that has courts, or they'll be in trouble in that country. And countries are free to cooperate with each other to enforce these.

Pavel Durov was arrested when he traveled to France because Telegram was noncompliant with French court orders. You can ignore them in Russia... you can't ignore them in France. And you can ignore Russian court orders in France but not in Russia. And the Russian or Indian court is free to ask the Montenegrin government to suspend your domain name and the Montenegrin government is free to agree or disagree.

hnlmorg 1 hour ago||||
Signal is already well known to governments. In fact a few years ago there was a report in the UK media about how some governments used signal instead of official channels like email and did so because of Signals disappearing messages feature (ie making those MPs less accountable).
einpoklum 1 hour ago||
More recently, a Signal chat record leaked, between US national security advisor Mike Waltz, US VP JD Vance and others, regarding the ongoing illegal assassinations in Yemen:

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/24/politics/yemen-strikes-jo...

and it didn't leak because of Signal's security, but because an Atlantic maganize journalist was added to the group chat by Waltz.

esseph 1 hour ago||
We are clear on OPSEC
milkshakes 1 hour ago|||
in fact, telegram does support e2e encryption ("secret chats")
ivanmontillam 1 hour ago||
It does, but it's not enabled by default; and that's the point.
inigyou 1 hour ago||||
Telegram shields its users from such requests.

Other platforms either don't have the requested data (Signal) or willingly hand it over when they get a court order to (Facebook). When Telegram gets a court order it ignores the court order and then makes Pavel Durov hard to physically find and therefore arrest. One can only guess what motivations he has for this.

So courts seek alternative enforcement mechanisms.

axus 2 hours ago||||
Not every country has DMCA safe harbor for service providers. A crap sandwich may taste horrible but it has bread.
joe_mamba 1 hour ago|||
>But Telegram hasn't engaged in that, some of their users have.

Yeah, but government workers just want a legal slam dunk to call it a day and collect the glory, and it's always easier to go after the platform where the crimes are being discussed, rather than after the individual users actually committing the crimes.

It's how government, prosecution and law enforcement jobs are incentivized.

inigyou 35 minutes ago||
It's more likely they did go after the individual users, by sending a demand to Telegram to identify the users, and Telegram refused.
indolering 2 hours ago||
Montenegro (.me) seems to be aligned with the EU. But I would have expected there to see a legal ruling in France before Montenegro would do this sort of thing.

I wouldn't be surprised if GoDaddy caved to request. They are known for giving up domains to anyone with a badge and a fax machine!

dylan604 1 hour ago|||
Is the badge really that much of a requirement? I mean, if you have a fax machine, you must be a legit source to make that request.
inigyou 34 minutes ago|||
serverHold status means registry, not registrar, hold - the relevant protocol (not WHOIS) has the registry as the server, as you'd expect. But you are right about GoDaddy and they are a strange choice.
driverdan 16 minutes ago||
Archive warrior's default project is mirroring t.me links. If you're running it you'll need to switch to a different project. It isn't handling the domain not resolving well, it stuck in timeout backoffs.
haskman 3 hours ago||
We only recently started moving the Functional Programming India community from Telegram to Zulip. That decision is looking better and better!
Imustaskforhelp 2 hours ago|
Zulip is amazing. Nothing against that but what are your thoughts on fluxer and the others (recently chatto seems interesting, matrix, stoat are interesting options as well).

Also awesome initiative by the way, how did you end up making it and I'd love to know some backstory about it actually as well.

kaladin-jasnah 2 hours ago||
Not the original commenter, but Matrix is awful. I used it on and off, and self-hosted it too. It's slow, bloated (I'm pretty sure I tried other homeservers). The app UI/UX is not great either. The E2EE stuff got better by the end but adoption-wise I was able to get way more people on Signal.
Imustaskforhelp 2 hours ago||
For matrix, I don't use the original client but rather cinny. This client is so good that I wish that other clients and it looks really good in UI/UX, honestly I have had some serious thoughts of porting this UI sometimes: https://cinny.in, so I would be curious what you think about this as well.

(Side note: Fractal and the matrix element fork called schildichat are interesting as well. It is also possible to run matrix in terminal for what its worth as well, and nhekochat is good as well. Fractal runs on gtk and nheko runs on qt. I do agree though that running matrix homservers is a bit bulky sometimes from what I have heard but the client scene is probably really good so I am curious what you think about cinny :-D )

kaladin-jasnah 2 hours ago||
I used Cinny at some point, but the issue for me was the mobile client. I liked Cinny, but wasn't a huge fan of a web-based client. I think I tried Fractal and whatever KDE was working on and neither was polished at the time of use.
Imustaskforhelp 2 hours ago||
Hm yeah I understand, there were some issues in Fractal where it didn't support spaces sometime back (I am not sure about it right now), it was fun talking to the team at gnome though making fractal.

> I liked Cinny, but wasn't a huge fan of a web-based client.

I feel as if sacrifices must be made as Signal and most others are probably web based clients as well. Fractal probably comes as close to it tbh

> but the issue for me was the mobile client

Ah I see, I don't really run matrix on phone but yeah I understand what you mean, aren't there some clients like fluffychat and others for Android though? Certainly not as polished as Cinny I imagine but it should be workable (hopefully) from my time seeing some of its screenshots. another side nitpick of matrix protocol but I have heard from people that Matrix clients sometimes take battery consumption.

When I was making https://mirror.forum I had my fair share of trying various protocols and to be honest, I feel as if we have enough good open source solutions out there that the tech part just isn't the limiter anymore and FOSS solutions in general might be good enough but its the network effects which are the issues.

which is tangentially why I had built mirror.forum where you can add your discord, matrix, fluxer, stoat links all in one for a guy to join any of them by just changing the link from #discord to #fluxer among other things.

Though I do understand the overall frustration of wanting something which just works but Fluxer is an honestly good option as well and I would love to know if it fits your use case perhaps if not matrix, what do you think? IMO its a low hanging fruit to replace from discord to fluxer given how similar the overall UI/UX is. I also think that Fluxer also has a mobile client or is working on that.

markasoftware 1 hour ago||
Its serverHold which means the .me registry took this action, not the registrar (GoDaddy).
shishcat 1 hour ago|
Curiously, GoDaddy has a 38.352% stake in .ME registry services.
ventegus 3 hours ago||
I went here for an IP to write in /etc/hosts and no one has posted it yet :(
shishcat 3 hours ago|
dig +short @ns-cloud-b1.googledomains.com t.me

149.154.167.99

there you go

codedude64 3 hours ago||
I don't understand I visited the whois site and it seems all it's fine but I don't know if this match with the following cases.

- The site was suspended but now it's ok - The site was not suspended - There is other information about telegram suspended

inigyou 34 minutes ago|
serverHold status means suspended.
pKropotkin 1 hour ago|
NEVER use godaddy!
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