thanks

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!

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.

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).

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.

Suspended means the "serverHold" status. I haven't found any official blog post/announcement yet, but the status is unambiguous, and the fact that it happened to one of the Telegram's main short links means that it might be related to legal matters.

149.154.167.99

there you go

GoDaddy could apply "clientHold" but not "serverHold"

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.

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

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

Otherwise just use which ever registrar is cheapest and who you think will handle any quirks or shenanigans that registries may do to domains you own, and which own system and processes hold high enough standard for you.

So I can't imagine any serious organisation wanting to do business with them, unless they're a sleazy organisation themselves.

Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_surrounding_GoDa...

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.

You need your domain registrar to be stable and predictable. Their profile is not that.

(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 )

I wonder if the practice still exists.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_tasting#Domain_name_fro...

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45243123

If you are set on Namecheap anyway, Spaceship is a suggested replacement. It's run by Namecheap but with a new codebase.

Porkbun has been great so far. Easy to use, refreshingly minimal, and good prices.

And the government doesn’t even operate the registrar, it’s operated by doMEn d.o.o. which is a Montenegro version of an LLC.

Telegram also isnt device to device fully encrypted unless you use a more limited private chat and, as Telegram uses googles messaging service, so likely compromised to NSA anyway.

> 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.

I chose Porkbun because it's a small company with good prices, a good vibe, and all the tools that I need. Cloudflare was never going to be on the table because I don't want to feed the beast that is already swallowing the entire internet.

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.

clientHold = registrar (GoDaddy)

serverHold = registry (Montenegrin Registry)

That's because if they don't like your website being on your CDN, and they suspend your account, you'll lose your domain. If your domain is at Porkbun you can change it to point to a different IP address.

And avoid Cloudflare because they're centralising the internet.

The .io TLD will likely be phased out in the future due to geopolitics, and all the companies who decided it was more important to signal how hacker jargon aware their startup was will have to go through the very difficult process of changing domains.

In order to log into IRS.gov to get a code to pay my USA taxes, I had to verify my USA ID via a private company called ID.me, whose domain name AND company name are now forever tied to the whims of the government of Montenegro.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30504812

alas, it appears that screeching and throwing rocks at powerless peasants didn't help to end the war.

kiwi farms and 4chan are relatively harmless compare to what Telegram enables yet kiwi farms was taken offline at the behest of a political camp that has certain opinions about very basic stuffs that shouldn't even be grounds to be considered.

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.

It’s not really any different than this website we are now on being at the whim of the US government.

So if a court order is obtained in UAE then they will likely comply, but not from other countries?

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.

Vanity domains are beyond stupid and not worth the trouble.

For most people, the % of content that's "harmful" matters more than absolute harm numbers. This is a good thing, because otherwise after telegram, the next app to be canceled would be signal.

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.

Every domain has a country. It's as if every non-ccTLD was actually underneath .us. For legacy reasons .com .org etc were grandfathered in. gTLDs are also under .us for corrupt reasons.

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.

I said available for private use.

But then there's .io (and a few others: .ac, and previously .sh, .tm) where they were actually delegated to a British guy and are now controlled by the private company he started. And according to the British government, they have no agreement with the company, and they receive no revenue from the domain registrations.

> 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

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

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.

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

Both of these countries (anguilla is not independent though) 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.