March 27, 2026
Dead domains, live drama
21,864 Yugoslavian .yu Domains
A lost country’s web just resurfaced — and the comments are throwing punches
TLDR: A researcher published a CSV of 21,864 Yugoslav .yu sites recovered from the Wayback Machine. Comments erupted over whether killing old country domains breaks the web, why Soviet .su still lives, and if you can list all domains (you can’t), turning web archaeology into a policy-and-history slugfest.
Internet archaeologist Jacob Filipp just unearthed 21,864 lost Yugoslav .yu websites and dropped a giant CSV. He wrangled the Internet Archive’s CDX API, stumbled onto an old “www.yu” directory, and pieced together a massive map of a country that no longer exists. Nerdy? Yes. Quiet? Absolutely not.
The loudest chorus is furious at the rulemakers: one camp blames ICANN (the body that manages internet names) for “killing” .yu when Yugoslavia dissolved, saying it breaks the web for history’s sake. Then another bombshell: commenters point out that .su — as in Soviet Union — still exists and you can buy one today. Hypocrisy? Oversight? The thread turns into a full-on policy roast.
Meanwhile, a side-quest tried to “just ask the internet” for every domain ever. The crowd quickly explained you can’t make DNS servers spill their secrets anymore — cue the self-own: “guess that idea won’t fly lol.” The mood swings fast: from gleeful nostalgia to heavy reckonings about nationalism, with some users mourning the breakup and others venting at the politics that erased both people and domains. And yes, Filipp’s basement-battle cry — “MOM, fire up the router!” — immediately became a meme. This CSV isn’t just a list; it’s a time capsule that lit the comments on fire.
Key Points
- •The author provides a downloadable CSV of 21,864 domains from the former Yugoslavia’s .yu TLD.
- •The .yu top-level domain was removed from the internet in 2010 after Yugoslavia’s dissolution.
- •Anat Ben-David’s prior research reconstructed 17,460 unique .yu websites using the Wayback Machine.
- •Wildcard CDX API queries for *.yu are blocked without authorization, but subdomain queries (e.g., *.co.yu) are possible with pagination.
- •An archived site at www.yu, believed run by ISP Memodata, listed most .yu domains and, combined with CDX and wget, enabled compilation of the dataset.