Yep. It happens a lot. Most of the time it’s benign, fairly neutral websites.
As the other commenter mentioned, youtu.be is another example.
I don’t have a problem with people using TLDs for other countries or anything, my curiosity is whether Mali cares that it’s essentially a site glorifying Marxism–Leninism owned and operated by people who don’t live there, and apart from their glorified ideologies sharing an innitialism with the country code, the two don’t necessarily have any overlap…
Just seems like a PR problem if people take to using your country code TLD to spread propaganda that you disagree with, because your country will be regularly mentioned when discussing the site.
I don’t think anyone here will conflate Lemmy.ml with the people, beliefs or properties of the people of Mali, but all it takes is for one extremist tied to that site, to do something horrible, have a spotlight shined on lemmy.ml, and one over-enthusiastic journalist to mention that .ml is the country specific domain for Mali, and all of a sudden, otherwise ignorant common folk are associating acts of terrorism and violence with your country.
The government of Mali and specifically the department that runs the TLD, has the power to revoke their domain registration… I’m just saying.