21,864 Yugoslavian .yu domains
jacobfilipp.com47 points by freediver 2 days ago
47 points by freediver 2 days ago
Is there a practical way to enumerate all the registered internet domains? EG by asking DNS servers for all the domains they know about, and repeating over all DNS servers they know about?
EDIT: apparently, "asking DNS servers for all the domains they know about" is not something you can really do anymore for security reasons. Guess that idea won't fly lol
Enumeration of the entire DNS space is not available in general, but it does appear that some TLDs offer complete zone files for legitimate research purposes, see for example https://czds.icann.org/help#zone-files
This https://www.whoisxmlapi.com/whois-database-download.php is a start, but there's new ones every second so you're going to need to update a lot.
> apparently, "asking DNS servers for all the domains they know about" is not something you can really do anymore for security reasons. Guess that idea won't fly lol
There are actually a few nameservers that will just give all their domains to anyone who asks [0], but they are very much in the minority.
[0]: https://github.com/acidvegas/mdaxfr#tlds-that-allow-axfr
You could probably extract a lot from https://commoncrawl.org/
Here's the latest (although, it looks truncated at those having > 1M pages),
https://commoncrawl.github.io/cc-crawl-statistics/plots/tld/...
The complete list hides in the web graph:
https://data.commoncrawl.org/projects/hyperlinkgraph/cc-main...
and the specific file that's every host we've seen in the latest 3 crawls is:
https://data.commoncrawl.org/projects/hyperlinkgraph/cc-main...
It's interesting that while .yu was killed off, .su (Soviet Union) still exists and you can buy them today.
According to an article from last year, .su might get retired by 2030
Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43351793
I would assume because the Soviet Union had a recognised successor state (being the Russian Federation), where as Yugoslavia did not have a recognised successor state.
The former Yugoslavia had five legally recognized successor states.
https://treaties.un.org/doc/Treaties/2001/06/20010629%2001-3...
[flagged]
> At this point the old name is the only thing still missing.
And about 14 countries.
More like 11 and a half by now. Or actually 10 and three quarters, depending on how you count. They are tirelessly working on bringing that number down.
An even superficial ideological orientation toward Marxism-Leninism is also missing.
How so? I understand you are talking about Ukrainian and Georgian wars, but even them are hardly an attempt to return to SU days.
I'm not even talking about very limited influence over other ex-USSR republics. It is there but very limited.
It's not just that. Putin and his gang are actively pushing what is now referred to as neo-sovietism:
Yes, but again - this more about their afforts to appeal to a certain part of domestic popularion rather than a fair attempt of rebuilding USSR.
It's more about "ice cream for 47 kopecks" rathan then anything else.
> this more about their afforts to appeal to a certain part of domestic popularion
And yet, more than a million Russian lives alone were sacrificed to make the appeal reality.
Russia, like it or not, is actively busy restoring its older glorious days and unfortunately there is no sign of them coming anywhere near to a point where they can't sustain their losses any more. They're permanently losing upwards of 1000 soldiers per day, and that's not counting the injured, only deaths.
There's no Neo-Sovietism but Duginism. It's a like an even more hardcore version of the Spanish Francoism but a la Slavic way.
They hate science and praise the Orthodox ideology with high statism. And without a country-loving science China it's just getting a luxury present for free themselves.
They will progress like crazy with very little efforth and they could buy Russian assets for scraps.
You're missing Moldova as well.
And yes, Russia keeps invading, hacking, politically pressuring and organising disinformation campaigns to make these ex-USSR countries fall back into Russia's bloody wing.
For kicks and giggles and because my wife was born in Yugoslavia I bought Yugoslavia.org a few years ago. Would like to do something meaningful with it.
The ICANN policy of removing TLDs just because a country no longer exists makes no practical sense and only serves to break the internet.
Yugoslavia broke into several smaller countries following the death of the Yugoslavian dictator, and a huge war ensued. Maintaining the domain records was probably quite a low priority.
I assume you're referring to Tito? He died in 1980. None of the constituent countries tried to leave Yugoslavia until 1991, right? That's following, technically, but there's a lot of history in that decade. From my very vibes based knowledge of the area, Tito is the only dude who could have held it together though.
You got the timeline wrong.
The break-up of Yugoslavia was a long, arguably still on-going, process, the final phase of which happened peacefully. Serbia and Montenegro, that made the post-1992 Yugoslavia, agreed in 2003 to change the name of the country to Serbia and Montenegro, pending the Montenegrin independence referendum scheduled for 2006.
Considering the possibility of another country name depreciation in three years, they agreed to keep the yu domain.
Fun fact, had the Montenegrin referendum gone the other way, the plan was to use .cs as the national domain, which used to be owned by another ex-country, Czechoslovakia.
.yu was purchasable long after the country ceased to exist, until 2008 to be exact.
Technically speaking, "Yugoslavia" continued to exist until 2003, when the name finally got deprecated in favour of "Serbia & Montenegro" as one country (also including the territory of Kosovo), which itself only lasted 3 years before Montenegro declared independence (and Kosovo did the same 2 years after).
So however you spin it, the domain outlived the country by at least 5 years, arguably 15(ish), 9 of which were post-war(s).
The organization that ran the nameservers for .yu still exists today. Even in the case where there was no one fit to run them, all the records could be transferred to ICANN or someone else to run the server.
Now I want to try writing letters and see if they still get delivered if I write down the predecessor country.
Some of the modern-day countries retained their five-digit postcodes from Yugoslav times (Serbia and Bosnia for sure, maybe a few more, I'm too lazy to check), some only got rid of the first digit which used to identify individual Yugoslav republics (AKA modern-day countries).
So I'd say it's highly likely they'd be delivered, as it's still mostly the same, though I should point out many cities changed names since. For like the most basic example, Montenegro's capital was called Titograd between WW2 and 1992, before it swapped back to being called Podgorica.
I've encountered a surprising number of forms where "Serbia" isn't an option, but Yugoslavia is, even in 2026. There's been a number of times here in the Netherlands where I had to pick Yugoslavia as my place of birth on official government forms because we were technically still Yugoslavia in '98 and not Serbia and Montenegro.
I have no doubts that snail mail addressed to Yugoslavia still exists and probably gets routed just fine
Considering how my parents still refer to that area of the world as Yugoslavia, I'm pretty sure the postal system will know how to route it. Will probably be escalated to a human for labeling though.
There's hundreds of thousands of websites with the .su domain.
(The USSR dissolved before the world-wide-web was even a thing.)
If Barclays can get their own vanity TLD then Yugoslavia should be able too.
Granted, ccTLDs has been already going on for years before USSR change their pronoun to were. Mostly for email, no idea if ccTLDs found their use on BBS.
I can understand .su continuing because Russia pretty much took over everything that represent Soviet Union elsewhere (embassies, Security Council seat, etc) and other former Soviet states either support the continuation or indifferent. Yugoslavia continuation is more contentious topic.
fully agree. also Yugoslavia lives on, in our heart :,)
Core of Yugoslavia, still lives on in cultural space, where music, movies, and literature are consumed in all ex republics. Except probably Kosovo, which was not part of serbo-croatian linguistic space. But even in Slovenia and Macedonia there's a significant part of population which at least understands common language. And it's not only about language, there's lot of shared mentality and history from Yugoslav period.
Sadly even Cyber Yugoslavia is no more, it only shows the text "juga.com" now:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220122221632/http://www.juga.c...
The fall of Yugoslavia was a horrible tragedy and a stark example of the horrors of nationalism.
Neighbors, brothers, friends, who spoke the same language and occupied the same cultural space, suddenly reduced to their narcissism of small differences and committing horrible atrocities in the name of a tribe.
And for what? For the chance of living in a dysfunctional rump state with nowhere near the relevance of what they used to have.
I saw a YouTube short video recently that claimed something that might seem obvious to many but not to me — it claimed then Prime Minister of UK and the President of France were displeased by the reunification of Germany because their own countries' relative status would go down. Is this really how people think?
Is this how our allies think?
> Is this how our allies think?
The old quip about NATO is that its purpose was to keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down. I don't know how much that really reflected elite sentiment or not.
EDIT: well it was coined by the first Secretary General of NATO so make of that what you will https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hastings_Ismay
Yes, France had the idea to weaken Germany in exchange by forcing it off the D-Mark. A move that unexpectedly had the opposite effect and further strengthened Germany's economy.
In post war Germany the sentiment of relative status compared to our allies in the most powerful people was mostly gone. You can expect as we move more towards the right, and WW2 gets more and more forgotten, it will come back.
I don't think it was concern about relative status, more the risk that a reunited Germany could once again become a significant economic/military power that could threaten the stability of Europe.
Did you miss all the explicit American messaging about "we need to keep China down, or else it might surpass us"?
I love reading historical documents, and this is how people have been thinking for as long as there is recorded history.
Why do you think the Trump admin is so set on sabotaging the EU?
They even put it into their National Security Strategy: https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2025/12/make-europe-great-...
When you say it like that, it sounds like we didn't have a side that started all wars, like we killed each other for fun. And it was all because of the "all Serbs in one state" ideology.
Brate, this is exactly the toxic nationalism that caused this all.
No side is without blame. Everyone did horrible things, everyone is trying to tune out their own atrocities and emphasize the ones committed by the others.
Yes, the Serbs did horrible crimes. But ask the population of Mostar if the Croats were without blame. Ask Serbs how they felt about their treatment by Bosniaks in Čelebići.
As long as we keep this pretense of "our side good, other side bad", we are falling for the same trap that caused this mess in the first place.
Bratstvo i jedinstvo, a ništa drugo.
ICTY has the same conclusion as you, except it is totally opposite :) It can't be only "everyone did horrible things", and to talk the same about the aggressor and the victims. Yes, all sides did SOME horrible things, but one side started all of it, did the majority of the horrible things, and has 99% of the ones prosecuted by ICTY. What the hell was JNA doing in Bosnia when Bosnia was an independent country? Gradjanski rat, ali u qrcu. Bratstvo i jedinstvo umrlo s Titom.
This whole category of thinking in terms of sides is the problem in the first place. Thinking in these categories only strengthens the nationalist prosecution complex that drives the hatred in the first place.
Which subethnicity started it or whatever doesn't fucking matter., this whole line of thinking only leads to more hatred, more destruction, more dysfunction.
As a Croat, my enemy is not my fellow Yugoslav, my enemy is the nationalist thugs on all sides that destroyed my country so they could rule over their hateful little fiefdoms.
Bratstvo i jedinstvo is coming back, under a blue flag with yellow stars. Montenegro is joining the EU next, with Schengen etc bratstvo i jedinstvo between crna gora and hrvatska will be restored.
Damn ethnic nationalism... in the end it was just profit for local psychos dealing with their own ethnics like sheeple.
If Yugoslavia got a political transition as it happened in Spain to a social-democracy, (and yet the Spanish constitution states that all goods belong to the state in case of general intereset, such as a great catastrophe), they would evolve together and wars would have been a thing of the past.
As an anecdote, read about the creation of the Warajevo ZX emulator, a cross-ethnic colaboration from several Yugo people to get spare PC parts and books while avoiding snipers.
BTW: a country not existing is not an excuse. The Catalan language stretch over Spain, Andorra (the official language) and a bit of France and Italy. Ditto with the Basque language (and .eus domain).
.Yu could be reused for content written in Serbo-Croatian language. Ah, yes, the Cyrillic script, but today that task would be trivial, and I'm pretty sure that due to the exposure to the Latin scripts the Serbians can read Croatian texts perfectly fine.
> BTW: a country not existing is not an excuse.
for ccTLD it is, Catalan and Basque language TLDs are a different type / 3 letters.
Just out of interest, are you coming from the area?
Yugoslavia was a great thing that europe lost, and perhaps it shouldn't have. The EU membership and shengen area might make a big impact in the region though.