this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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Lemmy

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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to [email protected].

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Well, this is just weird. When I was migrating from Reddit to this fediverse world I chose .ml and thought it was short for "machine learning" which seemed as a cool domain for me at the time.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 2 years ago (5 children)

FYI, two letter TLDs are country/region/jurisdiction specific. There's an ISO standard for that.

  • .tv Tuvalu
  • .me Montenegro
  • .fm (Federation of) Micronesia

Some countries append additional modifiers to classify their uses:

  • .uk United Kingdom
  • .co.uk Company
  • ...

Three or more are generic (traditional or new)

  • .com, .net, .org, ...

In some cases, Uncle Sam said "first!" and it stuck.

  • .edu Education (MURICA)
  • .mil Military (MURRICA)
  • .gov Government (MURRRICA)

Just like what happens with Mali, what some silicon valley hipsters decide as a 'fun' acronym is just that, a fun thought. If the corresponding government decides to take away a specific domain, they probably can.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 years ago (3 children)

.mil Military (MURRICA)

That is what made this whole .ml problem. Some people have apparently accidentally leaked American state secrets to Mali by typo.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

That's a poor excuse. If something is secret or higher it has a different TLD. The SIPRnet uses .smil for example. There are also tools at the boundaries that don't allow going from SIPR to NIPR unless they meet specific criteria. Basically you can only leak those secrets accidentally if they were already on a system they shouldn't have been on.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

Additionally, competent IT would make this fuck up impossible. I'm shocked that they didn't whitelist TLDs and block all others.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Classified and top are in a separate system that can't leak.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 years ago (1 children)
  • .edu Education (MURICA)

.edu is not only american. For example I know many schools in France have .edu domains and emails, and I believe it's the case in many more countries.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 years ago (1 children)

In 2001 it was limited to US educational institutions only, all registrations prior were grandfathered in.

Although I haven't got a clue why my non-US university, founded in 2009, has a .edu domain.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I did not know that. That's not cool

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Pretty sure most countries use .ac for universities. Ac.uk, ac.au, ac.nz are all standard.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

Australia doesn’t. We’re all .edu.au

Edit: here is the list of who uses it. Stands for academia if it wasn’t self evident to anyone else either.

2nd edit: having trouble with escaping characters in the link so it’s defaulting to the ac page when it should be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.ac_(second-level_domain)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Sorry, remembered wrong.

Stands to reason, you guys like .com.au instead of .co.wherever as well.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

And io belongs to the British Indian Ocean Territory.

There are thousands of gTLDs now, though. But most of them are brand names.

https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db

[–] Blaze 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 years ago (1 children)

That's a generic top-level domain. It is not associated with any country. It belongs to "Identity Digital Inc.".

[–] Blaze 6 points 2 years ago

Interesting, thanks

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

Thanks for the clarification. If this instance goes down please someone start an ''lemmy.ai'' instance. I want to follow the same logic that I went with since the beginning.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

No, it's Mali.

The rumour is that lemmy devs chose it to mean "marxist leninist" but I think it's more likely they wanted a free domain name.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 2 years ago (3 children)

The rumor is fake, the devs have said it multiple times. If they would have wanted to do some funny Marxism meme they would have used .su

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Maybe they didn't choose it for that, but to be fair they are definitely and admittedly Marxist-Leninists

[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yes, as there are plenty of other developers who are openly liberals or some other flavour of capitalism. You don't need to agree with the developers political choices all the time to use their software.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Right. My statement was one of fact, not trying to say it's a bad thing. I'm a Marxist-Leninist as well.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Hello there comrade! Nice to have you here!

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago

This was a lovely exchange comrades

[–] [email protected] -2 points 2 years ago

Yeah they are, so if they did choose .ml for that reason they would have no problem admitting it also. So it's pretty clear that they just wanted a free domain.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

SU = Soviet Union

[–] emergencyfood 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Don't you need to be a citizen of a CIS nation to get a .su domain?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

It depends on the registrar.