Oh I know all about that. It’s one of the reasons I enjoy clowning on tankies on lemmy.ml so hard.

Fun fact: the .ml TLD is officially designated as belonging to Mali; the lemmy devs chose it as an acronym for “Marxist-Leninist”. This caused problems very recently when Mali suddenly re-exerted control of their TLD, where previously they did not take an active hand in its management.

I’ll copy the top comment there, because it’s actually kind of important if you’re at all into web infra or self-hosting:

Using ccTLDs when you have no relationship with the country is just asking for trouble. Comes across as naive and unprofessional, although I’ve seen many serious infrastructure built upon .co and .io names.