So Our Domain Dropped Us

Oh, hi again! Tarro here. We've been gone for a couple weeks, but now we're back! Wow! We should be back to our regularly scheduled content again starting this weekend, including our throwback Wednesdays. We've been super happy with how well that's been received, and so we're going to keep going with that, bringing you little extra article blasts from the past. 
 
If you're not in our Discord server, chances are you probably don't know why we've been gone. Upon reading the title of this article, you probably got a good idea. Before I dive into that though, I should just quickly make sure you know a few of the basics of how the internet works behind the scenes. You're not going to need to learn binary or anything here, I just want to give you a summary of how a link magically makes a website appear on your screen. 
 
Say you have an idea for a website with a magazine on it, and you're looking to give that magazine website to the world via the magic of the internet. There's a couple different hoops that you've gotta jump through to do that.
 
First of all, you need your data. Your actual files. The computer code and what not. 
 
From there, you need to find somewhere where that data can live. Basically, you need a special kind of server that allows other computers all over the world to connect to it, to access that data even when your own laptop is turned off. The last time we had an outage, this was the area of the problem: The company hosting our site on their servers decided it no longer wanted to host us, and they dropped us. Thankfully, that wasn't the issue this time.
 
But, the third thing that you need is a way for people to actually find the right directions to get to your site, like following a treasure map but over the course of nanoseconds instead of an entire evening. For example, putting "google.com" into your address bar will take you right to Google's servers; you don't need to start trying to guess where Google's servers are in real life so you can drive over to them and ask a receptionist for dog pictures, you can just say the name of their website instead, "google.com", and the internet will quickly send a bunch of messages around to figure out where the servers are for that website name, and then show you the page that you need.
 
You can think of all this like a house. You can have all the parts of a house, but you need to have somewhere to build it; that's the host. But, even if you build your house on a plot of land, if you're deep in the woods in the middle of nowhere, chances are it's going to be very hard to convey to people how to actually visit you, and you might need to offer them special invites. For a public website you either need to put in the exact public IP number and port you are trying to connect to, an unfriendly process for us non-robots and unreliable since those numbers change often, or you need a domain address which utilizes easy-to-remember words. The second one is far more common, being an easy way of telling your web browser what destination you're trying to go to as it navigates the internet for us. For example, our address was "zooey.pub"
 
However, we need to get one step deeper here. You can technically just contact the city (or a domain registrar) and buy an address, but that can be a tricky process and requires you giving up a lot of information to do so. Instead, we opted to work with a company that buys the address for you. That company is called Njalla. Basically, Njalla's whole point is that they register themselves as the owner of that address, and do all the paperwork, and then just let you live there. You pay for the address, and you also pay them for this service. 
 
Now, you might be thinking to yourself, "Hey, isn't it kind of stupid to give that much control over your site to a third party?" and yes you're right, and I'm actually thinking that myself nowadays. But when we were first building the site we were recommended them by a friend. Here's the thing about Njalla, as far as all of their branding goes, this shouldn't have ever happened. Njalla describes itself as "The world's most notorious privacy provider for domains, VPS', and VPN's." In fact, the mission statement on the home page of their site even reads:
 
"Everyone says they're different and how cool they are. Startups talk about how they want to disrupt an industry. We just want a decent society; like most people. We build the services that are lacking. The most interesting people that use our services are the ones that make us have to go to court to protect them. Or get DDoS attacked. We're not gonna win the entrepreneurship awards or get a big loan with that business plan, but we're here to make life good and to make privacy extremely normalized."
 
Hopefully, upon reading that, you can get the idea as to why we were feeling pretty good about using this service to run a safe for work magazine. They actually speak a lot in their social media and branding about how they're willing to take a lawsuit for their clientele with how much they believe in free speech. 
 
Which is why a few weeks ago, when our site unexpectedly went down, Njalla was the last of all the places we looked as to why we weren't up and running anymore. We checked every other possibility, spending hours trying to figure it out, before eventually trying Njalla, just to find that they scrapped our domain, leaving this exact message.
"Hi.
We are not interested in hosting any zoo-stuff. You have 48 hours to move domains related to that stuff away from Njalla. Failure to comply will result in your entire account including all domains being suspended."
 
This was interesting for a couple of reasons. Partially because they weren't hosting anything. They were just the domain name registrar. It was also interesting that they called it zoo-stuff, an incredibly vague and incorrectly punctuated term. 
 
I wasn't the one who actually got this message, I have a team who helps on the back end to keep the site up and running. They were the one that got that message. They tried to get more details from the support member that sent them the message, but Njalla was incredibly uncooperative. But, no big deal we figured, we were more than happy to just up and go. It's very easy to port a domain to another platform. Or, back to our house metaphor, just get someone else to come put up a street sign for you.
 
In Njalla's terms of service, they say things that make it sound like they're more than willing to release domains back to their clients at any time for any reason, talking about how you "actually" own the domain name and that they are just the middleman here. So, we asked for our domain name to be released, so we could port it to another service and have the site up in no time. 
 
They said no. 
 
They said that they weren't going to release the domain. This is where things got complicated. See, the team helping run the back end had a few other sites, some of them even zoo sites, and those domains got released back upon request, but not ours. When we asked why they weren't releasing specifically our domain, they said that "The original complaint was filed against our site."
 
 
And that's it.
 
I want to make it really clear here. I'm not trying to keep things mysterious or vague, this is actually the full extent of what they were telling us. We asked what the complaint was, who it was from, what kind of complaint was it, what that meant for the domain, what their plans are. They didn't answer any of our questions. 
 
Out of desperation, I even sent them my own very nice and friendly email, just asking for any kind of explanation on what's happening. They didn't reply. They stopped replying to anyone, just ghosting us. 
 
For all of Njalla's branding about being super in favor of free speech, their terms of service allows them to fuck someone over for any reason if they want to, and that's what they did to us. They say that we can request our domain back, but there are preconditions to being able to do so, and they don't actually say that they have to follow through with our request. They also say that they may choose to keep, suspend, or cancel your registration if they see your registration as a potential risk to their business: it doesn't even have to be proven that we have costed them anything, they could just get a single complaint and then decide to shut down our website and keep our domain name. To add to this, you pay for this service on an annual basis, and our contract had just come up for renewal very recently. So, on top of taking the domain, they also took a year's worth of money for their service which they are no longer providing.
 
It's frustrating, because at this point it's hard to imagine that this was anything other than a spite move. There's no reason for them to keep holding onto the domain outside of just pure pettiness, or a general disdain for zoos that matters more to them than their own mission goals. Njalla's team has been shockingly unprofessional, and I would not recommend them for any use.
 
So, what now? Well, as you may or may not have noticed, our site is now hosted on a different domain, a different address. https://zooeydotpub.zdu.se/, utilizing the zdu.se domain that was recently acquired to help create backup addresses for zoo projects in cases of deplatforming in the future. It's exactly the same site, and it's going to be exactly the same going forwards as far as content goes. Two articles a week as well as the throwback. You're just going to have to plot a different address into google maps to get here.
 
Opinions on what happens next vary a lot among the team. Tarro hopes this is a temporary solution, and that we won't have to be stuck mooching off of a friend's domain name forever. Alissa wants to do a little bit of rebranding so that our identity, Zooey Dot Pub, isn't tied to a specific domain name anymore anyways, but she hasn't thought of any cooler names yet. Dogteeth and Eggshell were kissing dogs and unwilling to comment on the situation. Our tech team has been enormously helpful in getting us back on our feet again and helping us understand what the situation is and what our options are.
 
At the end of the day, we are very well positioned to pivot to whatever makes the most sense. We still have our Twitter and our Discord. 95% of people get to the website by clicking a link, so for the vast majority of you this shouldn't impact you at all. But, please let other readers know that the new link isn't some bad way to try and IP grab you, it's just a compromise while we wait and see where we're going to end up long term. 
 
Thank you so much for your patience as we figured this all out. Unfortunately, deplatforming is just a reality when it comes to being a zoo on the internet. I doubt this is the last time we're going to have to scramble because one day we wake up and suddenly someone decided to get rid of us overnight. But, we're always going to keep coming back. We love putting this magazine out there for you each week. It's something that's not just fun, but something that's important, and we take that very seriously. And to everyone that's sent in messages of kind words checking in on us and telling us how much the magazine means to you, we really appreciate it. 
 
And, to Njalla, if anyone from there is reading this, what the fuck. Not to get too bitter here, but as a company that bastions yourself as defenders of privacy and free speech, to care so little about a group of people fighting for the right to just have our own voice, the way that you've handled this has been so telling to your true beliefs. If we were a hardcore porn site that was hosting abuse or something, I'd get it. I honestly would. But we're a text focused magazine, just trying to give our side of the story. To not only ban us with no warning at all, but also to hold our name hostage spitefully like this is incredibly disappointing. You were a company that I really thought was doing something cool. It turns out you were extremely normal in the end after all. In all the same ways that everyone else is.
 
Anyway, tomorrow we'll be re-releasing our Jaywalking article, since it really didn't have much time to shine before the website was taken down, and then Wednesday we'll have another throwback, and next weekend will be all new content. We've got some great articles planned, so make sure you check it out! 
 
We also, about two weeks before all this happened, got kicked off of the paypal we were using because we were "buying and selling illegal sexual content," which is a bit of a stretch when we haven't bought anything, and only ever used it to accept donations, but that's a whole other story we don't need to get into at this point. Instead, just wanted to let you know that we've officially got ourselves a LiberaPay account! 
 
 
So, if you're interested in supporting the magazine financially, you can do so at that link. It's the same platform ZooTT uses, so hopefully we can use it a little longer. Donations are set up like Patreon where it's a monthly thing, but you can do one month at whatever amount you choose and then cancel immediately. It's okay, we don't mind. 
 
Anyway, enough plugging. Thanks for coming along for the ride, dear readers, and we'll see you soon! 
 
 
Article written by the ZDP team (August 2024) 
Check our our twitter at https://twitter.com/ZooeyDotPub
Questions, comments or concerns? Check out our Discord server! discord.gg/EfVTPh45RE

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