[HN Gopher] 21,864 Yugoslavian .yu domains
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21,864 Yugoslavian .yu domains
Author : freediver
Score : 68 points
Date : 2026-03-25 22:20 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (jacobfilipp.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (jacobfilipp.com)
| charcircuit wrote:
| The ICANN policy of removing TLDs just because a country no
| longer exists makes no practical sense and only serves to break
| the internet.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Now I want to try writing letters and see if they still get
| delivered if I write down the predecessor country.
| sznio wrote:
| 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.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| 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.
| martheen wrote:
| 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.
| vasac wrote:
| Russia pretty much took over all the USSR's external
| debts too.
| input_sh wrote:
| 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.
| Gare wrote:
| In Croatia only Zagreb got changed to 10 000 (because
| capital), the rest stayed the same.
| sensanaty wrote:
| 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
| onion2k wrote:
| 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.
| charcircuit wrote:
| 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.
| input_sh wrote:
| .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).
| bojan wrote:
| 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.
| 1-more wrote:
| 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.
| kome wrote:
| fully agree. also Yugoslavia lives on, in our heart :,)
| vrganj wrote:
| Bratstvo i jedinstvo, druze.
| foobarian wrote:
| Mi smo Titovi, Tito je nas!
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| 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.
| ..
|
| http://www.juga.com/
| grujicd wrote:
| 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.
| foobarian wrote:
| Kusturica's movie "Underground" captures the Yugoslav vibe
| quite vividly, highly recommend
| 1-more wrote:
| > Except probably Kosovo, which was not part of serbo-
| croatian linguistic space.
|
| The Albanian speaking countries really punch above their
| weight for English language pop stars with global presence.
| ~7.5 Million Albanian speakers globally gave us Bebe Rexha,
| Dua Lipa, Ava Max, and Rita Ora. 22 Million Romanian
| speakers for a comparable post-Communist community and I
| don't think I know any pop stars with that background off
| the top of my head.
| Gare wrote:
| > and I don't think I know any pop stars with that
| background off the top of my head.
|
| But Romania gave us the Dragostea din tei (Numa-numa song
| :)
| 1-more wrote:
| A beautiful global phenomenon whose artist I sadly cannot
| name.
| ipcress_file wrote:
| There's a good podcast called "Remembering Yugoslavia."
|
| https://rememberingyugoslavia.com/
| voidUpdate wrote:
| 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
| onion2k wrote:
| You could probably extract a lot from https://commoncrawl.org/
| ks2048 wrote:
| Here's the latest (although, it looks truncated at those
| having > 1M pages),
|
| https://commoncrawl.github.io/cc-crawl-
| statistics/plots/tld/...
| ccgreg wrote:
| 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...
| 0x0 wrote:
| 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
| gucci-on-fleek wrote:
| > 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
| ks2048 wrote:
| Check out the "Root Zone Database",
|
| https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db
|
| (this doesn't have .yu)
| bit1993 wrote:
| 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.
| anthk wrote:
| 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.
| dolia wrote:
| Just out of interest, are you coming from the area?
| anthk wrote:
| No, but this is Warajevo's origin:
|
| https://worldofspectrum.net/warajevo/Story.html
| whatsupdog wrote:
| > Damn ethnic nationalism
|
| Nice to see you here Trudeau!
| petu wrote:
| > BTW: a country not existing is not an excuse.
|
| for ccTLD it is, Catalan and Basque language TLDs are a
| different type / 3 letters.
| vasac wrote:
| Both scripts have been taught in the early years of elementary
| school in Serbia for the past 80 years.
| ymolodtsov wrote:
| It's interesting that while .yu was killed off, .su (Soviet
| Union) still exists and you can buy them today.
| ChocolateGod wrote:
| 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.
| nradov wrote:
| The former Yugoslavia had five legally recognized successor
| states.
|
| https://treaties.un.org/doc/Treaties/2001/06/20010629%2001-3.
| ..
| bombcar wrote:
| Thou hast well said, Yugoslavia has no successor states:
| For Yugo hast had five successor states; and the domain
| thou now hast is not thy successor state: in that saidst
| thou truly.
| voidUpdate wrote:
| Students Unions all over the world are very happy about that
| mapmeld wrote:
| According to an article from last year, .su might get retired
| by 2030
|
| Previous HN discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43351793
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| That is more political than otherwise. SU and EU both are
| exceptional reservations in ISO 3166-1 alpha-2.
| qingcharles wrote:
| And there is now a whole issue over .io that might disappear in
| the near future and take thousands of SaaS and AI companies
| with it.
| staringforward wrote:
| Good riddance
| vrganj wrote:
| 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.
| collabs wrote:
| 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?
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| I love reading historical documents, and this is how people
| have been thinking for as long as there is recorded history.
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| 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.
| vrganj wrote:
| 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-...
| RobotToaster wrote:
| It's how the psychopaths in charge think
| stkdump wrote:
| 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.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > I saw a YouTube short video recently
|
| You could've stopped there.
| 1-more wrote:
| > 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
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Did you miss all the explicit American messaging about "we
| need to keep China down, or else it might surpass us"?
| revolution88 wrote:
| 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.
| vrganj wrote:
| 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 Celebici.
|
| 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 nista drugo.
| revolution88 wrote:
| 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.
| vrganj wrote:
| 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.
| foobarian wrote:
| I think the problem is every tribe/nation/area has a
| percent of psychopaths (the estimates are 1 in 25), and
| if they run unchecked they end up doing evil things. This
| can then echo as the other side seeks retribution, etc.
| It takes significant effort to stomp out the fire.
| vrganj wrote:
| The only way to stop the fire is to stop blaming others
| for their fires.
| vasac wrote:
| So Croats and Muslims fought each other bloodily because all
| Serbs wanted to live in one state? Funnily enough, they were
| already living in one state - Yugoslavia - so they certainly
| had no reason to start the war.
| nradov wrote:
| The fall of Yugoslavia was a tragedy in a sense, but on the
| other hand maybe it should have never existed as a single state
| in the first place. It was always an artificial construct with
| the central government barely holding the country together,
| sort of like Iraq. People can mourn the loss but it was doomed
| from the start.
| vrganj wrote:
| Every country is an artificial construct.
| ungovernableCat wrote:
| If Yugoslavia had survived it'd have the relevance of maybe a
| combined Bulgaria and Romania today.
|
| Slovenia and Croatia were the most developed parts of it and
| would be burdened by fiscal transfers to undeveloped regions of
| Bosnia Macedonia and Kosovo. I'd argue Croats and Slovenians
| enjoy a higher quality of living with a government that can
| focus on the needs of its own citizens.
|
| You don't need political relevance or even resources to develop
| a great country. Look at Denmark as an example.
| seydor wrote:
| 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.
| jjallen wrote:
| 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.
| ajcp wrote:
| Just select one of the 5 successor states to Yugoslavia,
| forward all traffic to their ministry of foreign affairs, and
| then enjoy the heartfelt exchange of brotherly love and
| munitions that ensues!
| user_7832 wrote:
| I suppose I was mistaken, or perhaps outdated, in getting my
| geopolitical news from the NYT instead of HN comments
| apparently.
| Zecc wrote:
| I don't remember which HN thread I've heard this joke originally
| from, but...
|
| People in Montenegro: it's not .yu, it's .me
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