The article is not paywalled. You can access it for free by making an account, though I can understand if you don’t like that either. Their reasoning is here: https://www.404media.co/why-404-media-needs-your-email-address/

The gist is this: The Taliban government took control of .af, then queer.af decided not to re-up their domain (which would lapse this April), then the Taliban government immediately shut down many websites with names or themes they don’t agree with (which included shutting down queer.af suddenly and months ahead of schedule).