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
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.
> 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.
“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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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 (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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.)
Same for dog years, but why are we inventing ways to make it seem more than 10 years out when registries, quite reasonably, just use the date normally?
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think anyone cares about E2E encryption as much as tech people think.
For all of the much-vaunted complains about their lack of it, I am not aware of any proof or credible claims that Telegram the company has ever revealed the contents of non-encrypted messages or group chats.
Meanwhile, I don't think any authorities actually care about to what extent E2E Encryption makes it harder for Signal the corporation to extract message data. There's plenty of other ways to skin that cat - on-device compromises, abuse of backup mechanisms, abuse of mechanisms to manage linked devices, etc. They'd go after them just the same if they thought there was anything they really wanted on there.
If there's any real difference, I think it's most likely because many more of the group chats that such authorities are aware of and find "interesting" are on Telegram because basically nobody really does E2E well in medium-large groups right now.
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.
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).
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:
>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 to operate.
It's more likely they did go after the individual users, by sending a demand to Telegram to identify the users, and Telegram refused despite having the ability.
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!
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.
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.
registrars are bound by the political whims of those that allow them to exist there have been multiple domains that have been shut down at the behest of certain governments even when its well beyond their jurisdiction
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.
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.
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.
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.
Matrix the protocol is just fine, and all features you expect are there. Their problem is with actual apps that either don't support most of good features, are unpolished to the degree of being unusable, or both.
I agree that Matrix has a lot of problems, at least when used with the Element app, but I've found that voice calls are much better with Matrix compared to Signal over a flaky network. It was as good as WhatsApp in my experience.
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 )
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.
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.
They're in a position to get their own TLD (e.g .tgrm - edited from .tg); they should probably do this and run their own supporting infrastructure for it at this point.
Well, almost all of them are ultimately controlled by the nations, but there are quite a few that private companies operate because they've paid the nation to gain control.
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.
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.
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.
Didn't t.me also support showing previews of entire channels? Perhaps they got hit with a take-down of sorts due to content (e.g., CSAM) on any particular channel?
i really hope this is it from telegram. its downright causing havoc in countries without the jurisdictional power like korea and japan which have seen insane rise in drug related crime especially in
japan they have a new wave of crime from anonymous telegram operators running human cell crime ops
If telegram disappeared then others would immediately take its place.
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.
Yep, I would never use a registrar called "go daddy". It always sounded like a registrar for noobs that will take adverse actions to "protect" you and this only confirms this.
What’s your beef? The name? Because I’ve been super happy with porkbun but damn, that name… and then the official-sounding ones like network solutions are quite shady. don’t judge a registrar by its name I guess.
The ad is not sexist, it's sexy/sexualized and humourous, which is something else. And of course it is from 2010, just before the great ... cultural shift.
It’s absolutely #%^*ing bizarre to me how many 500+ employee tech companies use it. I just don’t get it. I know IT isn’t web developers but they ought to at least have better opinions on this kind of thing?
GoDaddy is a shit registrar, but it has nothing to do with the name. You shouldn’t be basing your choices (or your HN recommendations) on product names, domain names, or other similar “vibes-based” reasoning.
FWIW, I have also never liked the name, but the name is just marketing. This should rank very low in your decision matrix, hopefully.
I would recommend a registrar that would explain to the customer why they would not want a .me domain for anything critical unless the person lives in Montenegro and trust the Government of Montenegro to maintain a good and trust worthy registry.
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.
ccTLD hacks are both semantically incorrect and geopolitically unstable.
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.
It's very different. If the USA soon starts cancelling politically inconvenient domains, European ones will be safe. Just like Nazi propaganda domains would be censored in Europe, but are safe in the US.
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.
Never use the same company for your hosting or CDN and your domain, and avoid cloudflare in general.
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.
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.
Never had any trouble with them, but also moving away from them is unnecessarily hard (the code sometimes takes a day to arrive) and they cover the entire interface with their paid hosting stuff which makes them a poor registrar. I ended up on them because of Google Domains selling off but got off them because very annoying to use.
I'd honestly be careful with squarespace. They are owned by private equity, advertise on countless YouTube channels, and at the same time their core market is under a looming threat from the AI companies.
You need your domain registrar to be stable and predictable. Their profile is not that.
My understanding is that both GoDaddy and Namecheap used to do domain front running[0] at the time I was registering my first handful of commercial domains, so I've always avoided even using their search engines.
My bank automatically blocks payments to Namecheap. When I had domains with them, I had to call and give prior approval for the exact amount I would be paying. My bank claimed it was because of a high number of fraudulent charges.
Namecheap got bought by private equity fairly recently, so i switched away from them. Wouldn’t recommend starting with them just in time for the enshittification to start.
Their prices had already been going up for a few years before that, which finally pushed me off them starting around August of last year. I'm about to swap my final few domains over this month before they renew.
Porkbun has been great so far. Easy to use, refreshingly minimal, and good prices.
FYI - Gandi was great, but they got bought by private equity a few years back and the price skyrocketed and service went downhill super fast after the buyout.
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
I would do something that isn't *.me, since it was them that suspended it.
.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
kiwifarms and sci-hub have been kicked off .is
.is is a very resilient TLD indeed, and it's well known in some communities.
It's a pretty good heuristic if some of the more targeted communities choose a TLD and stay up for some time.
how about .to? that's what i'm mainly using for my url shortener/redirects and haven't run into any issues... yet
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.
> 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.
“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.
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
The US being a puppet state of US commercial interests seems to be an apt description.
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
Because their economy is almost exclusively oil? Quite a few countries of the world would qualify if that's the case.
Total bullshit.
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.
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.
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 (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.
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.
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.
isis
ospf-vs-is.is
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.
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.
This is barely an issue… changing the redirect is instantaneous.
fair enough -- dunno what domains telegram uses
telegram.dog
I appreciate the idea, I'll happily adopt your SOP, seems pretty useful
thanks
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
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).
(2035 is less than 10 years from now)
(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.)
Same for dog years, but why are we inventing ways to make it seem more than 10 years out when registries, quite reasonably, just use the date normally?
I think they just flagged all locks in their admin portal. Like this: https://imgur.com/a/zoTQbwn
The status that actually says the domain is suspended is serverHold.
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-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think anyone cares about E2E encryption as much as tech people think.
For all of the much-vaunted complains about their lack of it, I am not aware of any proof or credible claims that Telegram the company has ever revealed the contents of non-encrypted messages or group chats.
Meanwhile, I don't think any authorities actually care about to what extent E2E Encryption makes it harder for Signal the corporation to extract message data. There's plenty of other ways to skin that cat - on-device compromises, abuse of backup mechanisms, abuse of mechanisms to manage linked devices, etc. They'd go after them just the same if they thought there was anything they really wanted on there.
If there's any real difference, I think it's most likely because many more of the group chats that such authorities are aware of and find "interesting" are on Telegram because basically nobody really does E2E well in medium-large groups right now.
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.
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).
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.
We are clear on OPSEC
in fact, telegram does support e2e encryption ("secret chats")
It does, but it's not enabled by default; and that's the point.
Not every country has DMCA safe harbor for service providers. A crap sandwich may taste horrible but it has bread.
>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 to operate.
It's more likely they did go after the individual users, by sending a demand to Telegram to identify the users, and Telegram refused despite having the ability.
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!
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.
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.
Yep.
clientHold = registrar (GoDaddy)
serverHold = registry (Montenegrin Registry)
IIRC Telegram has some kind of direct partnership with .me registry. I wonder if it's related
I can't believe they use GoDaddy as a registrar.
insanity. it almost undercuts everything they do.
Wait until you hear that the chats aren’t end to end encrypted.
i think it makes perfect sense if you understand what telegram is and which country it benefits
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.
registrars are bound by the political whims of those that allow them to exist there have been multiple domains that have been shut down at the behest of certain governments even when its well beyond their jurisdiction
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.
Clue me in? Is GoDaddy particularly censorial as a registrar?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3381822 still holding Godaddy's support for SOPA against them
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.
they're particularly incompetent
We only recently started moving the Functional Programming India community from Telegram to Zulip. That decision is looking better and better!
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.
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.
Matrix the protocol is just fine, and all features you expect are there. Their problem is with actual apps that either don't support most of good features, are unpolished to the degree of being unusable, or both.
I agree that Matrix has a lot of problems, at least when used with the Element app, but I've found that voice calls are much better with Matrix compared to Signal over a flaky network. It was as good as WhatsApp in my experience.
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 )
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.
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.
Its serverHold which means the .me registry took this action, not the registrar (GoDaddy).
Curiously, GoDaddy has a 38.352% stake in .ME registry services.
They're in a position to get their own TLD (e.g .tgrm - edited from .tg); they should probably do this and run their own supporting infrastructure for it at this point.
.tg is already used by Togo, although .te is not taken.
two-letter TLDs are reserved for country codes and not available for private use.
Not available for private use isn't exactly true...
which 2 letter TLDs are not controlled by states?
Well, almost all of them are ultimately controlled by the nations, but there are quite a few that private companies operate because they've paid the nation to gain control.
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.
.eu :troll:
Supposedly none because they're only given to states, but there're a few that have some murky administrative situations.
I went here for an IP to write in /etc/hosts and no one has posted it yet :(
dig +short @ns-cloud-b1.googledomains.com t.me
149.154.167.99
there you go
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
serverHold status means suspended.
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.
Direct link to the registry to verify the domain status (JSON): https://rdap.identitydigital.services/rdap/domain/t.me, Ctrl+F for "server hold"
NEVER use godaddy!
Yeah,a serverHold is placed by the Registrar.
It could be for a lot of reasons:
- spam, phishing or malware distribution
- contact verification issues
- trademark, copyright or cybersquatting legal issues
- or sometimes even errors or registrar transfer issues
It is a valuable and important domain for TG, most likely they'll resolve it soon
serverHold is set by the owner of the TLD, not the registrar.
registry*
Seems to be working fine? What does suspended imply here?
It might be working fine for you if the DNS server you're using hasn't propagated this change yet. The Google DNS server has: https://dns.google/query?name=t.me&rr_type=A&ecs=
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.
I stored all of my user images links with t.me and on my telegram mini app all users profile don't show the image. Switching to telegram.me
That's not likely to help, it was the .me people that suspended it, they will likely do the same with telegram.me
for a second I thought i was hacked
No announcement from Durov yet...
Any explanation?
centralized dns is always going to give some people headaches, but works for 99.9% of the rest of the people
Didn't t.me also support showing previews of entire channels? Perhaps they got hit with a take-down of sorts due to content (e.g., CSAM) on any particular channel?
someone enforcing a min character policy on them?
No. There are still many 1 char .ME domains available, and they've always costed an high price. https://imgur.com/a/0NL7oA6
serverHold means like "suspicious activity, domain is administratively held and taken off dns"
i really hope this is it from telegram. its downright causing havoc in countries without the jurisdictional power like korea and japan which have seen insane rise in drug related crime especially in japan they have a new wave of crime from anonymous telegram operators running human cell crime ops
Is there a defensible position from which to advocate removing the ability of other people to communicate privately? I can't think of any.
If telegram disappeared then others would immediately take its place.
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.
That's why they keep getting in trouble. They're not E2EE, but keep refusing court requests just because "we don't wanna"
They moved to Dubai?
So if a court order is obtained in UAE then they will likely comply, but not from other countries?
Or move again or hide forever. They already fled Russia and France. In Dubai they might be able to get protection with money.
source?
What counts as drug related crime?
A domain ban won't be 'it' for telegram.
This is what the problem is with DNS.
Telegram was always shady as hell.
Yep, I would never use a registrar called "go daddy". It always sounded like a registrar for noobs that will take adverse actions to "protect" you and this only confirms this.
The "serverHold" status is not set by GoDaddy, but by the actual .ME registry https://domain.me/
GoDaddy could apply "clientHold" but not "serverHold"
Weird. The .me registry specifically says there are no restrictions and even advertises Telegram.
What’s your beef? The name? Because I’ve been super happy with porkbun but damn, that name… and then the official-sounding ones like network solutions are quite shady. don’t judge a registrar by its name I guess.
Not the person you replied to, but GoDaddy are (or at least, were) pretty infamous for their sleazy and sexist ads, eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mi0AqS4e6NI
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...
The ad is not sexist, it's sexy/sexualized and humourous, which is something else. And of course it is from 2010, just before the great ... cultural shift.
It just doesn't sound professional, and I wouldn't want some "daddy" in a garage in charge of my domain name.
Also namecheap sounds shit, but afaik they have good reputation.
They used to, before they got bought out by private equity and started jacking up the rates. Moved all my domains to porkbun since then.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45243123
Not so much any more but I don't remember why. At least they started raising prices. Porkbun is the new Namecheap.
If you are set on Namecheap anyway, Spaceship is a suggested replacement. It's run by Namecheap but with a new codebase.
I mean, there was that whole elephant hunting thing...
It’s absolutely #%^*ing bizarre to me how many 500+ employee tech companies use it. I just don’t get it. I know IT isn’t web developers but they ought to at least have better opinions on this kind of thing?
GoDaddy is a shit registrar, but it has nothing to do with the name. You shouldn’t be basing your choices (or your HN recommendations) on product names, domain names, or other similar “vibes-based” reasoning.
FWIW, I have also never liked the name, but the name is just marketing. This should rank very low in your decision matrix, hopefully.
Which do you recommend?
I would recommend a registrar that would explain to the customer why they would not want a .me domain for anything critical unless the person lives in Montenegro and trust the Government of Montenegro to maintain a good and trust worthy registry.
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.
What’s with the shade on Montenegro? .me is a perfectly normal domain.
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.
ccTLD hacks are both semantically incorrect and geopolitically unstable.
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.
FYI, 75,2% of doMEn d.o.o. is controlled by American companies (GoDaddy.com LLC 38.352%, Identity Digital Limited 36.848%)
I mean, the government of Montenegro is a reasonable European democracy on its, admittedly slow, way to join the EU and is a NATO member.
It’s not really any different than this website we are now on being at the whim of the US government.
It's very different. If the USA soon starts cancelling politically inconvenient domains, European ones will be safe. Just like Nazi propaganda domains would be censored in Europe, but are safe in the US.
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.
porkbun are great
There is nothing Porkbun or any other registrar can do if Montenegro decides to suspend the domain, which seems to be what actually happened.
I also recommend porkbun
Is it better than cloudflare?
Never use the same company for your hosting or CDN and your domain, and avoid cloudflare in general.
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.
Depends on what you mean by better.
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.
i use it too,can only recommend, also funny website btw.
squarespace is legit. GCP cloud domains are moved to them.
Never had any trouble with them, but also moving away from them is unnecessarily hard (the code sometimes takes a day to arrive) and they cover the entire interface with their paid hosting stuff which makes them a poor registrar. I ended up on them because of Google Domains selling off but got off them because very annoying to use.
I'd honestly be careful with squarespace. They are owned by private equity, advertise on countless YouTube channels, and at the same time their core market is under a looming threat from the AI companies.
You need your domain registrar to be stable and predictable. Their profile is not that.
I've never had a problem with Namecheap but I'm not sure they are really any better as I've never had a problem with GoDaddy either.
My understanding is that both GoDaddy and Namecheap used to do domain front running[0] at the time I was registering my first handful of commercial domains, so I've always avoided even using their search engines.
I wonder if the practice still exists.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_tasting#Domain_name_fro...
I don't believe Namecheap ever did that, unless that was in the distant past. Never had a problem with them.
My bank automatically blocks payments to Namecheap. When I had domains with them, I had to call and give prior approval for the exact amount I would be paying. My bank claimed it was because of a high number of fraudulent charges.
Weird. I've been a customer for 15 years and never had any such problem.
Namecheap got bought by private equity fairly recently, so i switched away from them. Wouldn’t recommend starting with them just in time for the enshittification to start.
Their prices had already been going up for a few years before that, which finally pushed me off them starting around August of last year. I'm about to swap my final few domains over this month before they renew.
Porkbun has been great so far. Easy to use, refreshingly minimal, and good prices.
Dynadot. One of the largest registrars, and very competitive pricing like Namecheap. They also have very good features.
I’ve been happy with Gandi.net for years now. They’re based in France.
FYI - Gandi was great, but they got bought by private equity a few years back and the price skyrocketed and service went downhill super fast after the buyout.
I'm quite comfortable with Netim
porkbun
Stupid fucking name
AWS Route53 or Namecheap
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
So far so good, for personal use; they have the lowest renewal prices for top level domains.
Just be aware they can arbitrarily take it away from you. If that's fine with you, go ahead.