I asked this as a comment on my previous post, but I still have some questions. 1: If ML stands for Mali and they're not from Mali, then why would they represent a foreign country? 2: Since it's not Mali, what does the ML stand for? If it's a pair of letters, it represents a country or stands for two words. Machine Learning? McCartney Lennon? Mega Lemmy?
Just because someone registers a domain to host a website from Mali doesn't mean they represent Mali. Tonga sells domains to anyone with the .to extension, which are used by many torrent sites because Tonga doesn't care much about respecting piracy laws elsewhere.
Mali was chosen because the dev team has a lot of communists and ML is often used as a shorthand for Marxism-Leninism. Tangentially related: If you ever see a communists who is strangely enthusiastic about MultiLevelMarketing they are probably talking about Marxism-Leninism-Maoism when they say MLM.
It's the Mali top level domain. The devs were just originally looking for a cheap domain to use.
Though I would expect they purposefully looked for one that let them have a dual-meaning, since the .ml also stands for Marxist-Leninist, as the devs are big Russia, China, and North Korea supporters.