Well, this is just weird. When I was migrating from Reddit to this fediverse world I chose .ml and thought it was short for “machine learning” which seemed as a cool domain for me at the time.
FYI, two letter TLDs are country/region/jurisdiction specific. There’s an ISO standard for that.
.tvTuvalu.meMontenegro.fm(Federation of) Micronesia
Some countries append additional modifiers to classify their uses:
.ukUnited Kingdom.co.ukCompany- …
Three or more are generic (traditional or new)
.com,.net,.org, …
In some cases, Uncle Sam said “first!” and it stuck.
.eduEducation (MURICA).milMilitary (MURRICA).govGovernment (MURRRICA)
Just like what happens with Mali, what some silicon valley hipsters decide as a ‘fun’ acronym is just that, a fun thought. If the corresponding government decides to take away a specific domain, they probably can.
And io belongs to the British Indian Ocean Territory.
There are thousands of gTLDs now, though. But most of them are brand names.
.mil Military (MURRICA)
That is what made this whole .ml problem. Some people have apparently accidentally leaked American state secrets to Mali by typo.
That’s a poor excuse. If something is secret or higher it has a different TLD. The SIPRnet uses .smil for example. There are also tools at the boundaries that don’t allow going from SIPR to NIPR unless they meet specific criteria. Basically you can only leak those secrets accidentally if they were already on a system they shouldn’t have been on.
.eduEducation (MURICA)
.edu is not only american. For example I know many schools in France have .edu domains and emails, and I believe it’s the case in many more countries.
In 2001 it was limited to US educational institutions only, all registrations prior were grandfathered in.
Although I haven’t got a clue why my non-US university, founded in 2009, has a .edu domain.
That’s a generic top-level domain. It is not associated with any country. It belongs to “Identity Digital Inc.”.
I mean, I knew it was a country top level domain but I was told Dessalines intended the “ml” as an abbreviation for “marxist-leninist”
That is not true, he has said multiple times it was used because it was free.
No, it’s Mali.
The rumour is that lemmy devs chose it to mean “marxist leninist” but I think it’s more likely they wanted a free domain name.
The rumor is fake, the devs have said it multiple times. If they would have wanted to do some funny Marxism meme they would have used .su
Maybe they didn’t choose it for that, but to be fair they are definitely and admittedly Marxist-Leninists
