this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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It's called a single-point of failure in Engineering.
Funny enough it wasn't even a technical one but a contractual one.
Maybe there is some kind of lesson here on the risk of delegating critical structural elements to 3rd parties that rent rather than own that which they're selling ...
Unfortunately that has always been the nature of TLDs
It’s less sketchy if you pay for a domain through a reputable registrar
The issue here isn't the registrar though right? It's that the TLD is being repossessed by the government of the country it's meant to be associated with.
I think the point is that a reputable registrar wouldn't sell domains like these in the first place... But I'm not saying that's actually the case :/
Governments are unpredictable. It's not the registrar's job to mitigate that unpredictability to their customers.
Idk, I feel like we're only saying this because it's Mali... If it were .US or .CN people would be like "well, duh"
Every country gets to decide how tight of a grip they have on their TLD. Some sell it for some extra income (like Tuvalu) while others hang onto it for government or domestic use only
Yeah, and I'd say going with any of the ones that sell it or leave it free is a risk because you never know when their regime might change and the new one might want more of an official internet presence. Unless there's a 2nd level domain it's all under (like co.uk), you should assume they'll want it back at some point. This could apply more to popular domains that some governments could see as free traffic if they reclaim them.
Guess I should be worried about Lemmy.ca
They'll be fine as long as they keep up with their maple syrup or poutine tribute.
Not really. When you pay for .us domain you have it for a certain number of years. If the US tried to suddenly yank those back and violate the outstanding contracts for x number of years, there would most likely be lawsuits and an injunction from a federal judge blocking the action until there are hearings, etc. It would be a whole thing. If you simply couldn't renew your .us domain anymore, that's something you would know ahead of time and could plan for. It wouldn't just vanish one day.
More like, it's less sketchy if you pay for a domain at all. .ml was free, what did they think was going to happen?
Indeed... you never really purchase a domain. It's definitely more of a lease. And that's any tld.
For that instance, yes. For the whole of Lemmy, no. Everything else keeps on chugging along.
Indeed.
Imagine if this had happenned to a centralized system like Reddit...
A centralized system wouldn't have this problem since the only reason they can't just use another domain name is because of refederation. A great example of this happening is piracy websites, which notoriously get shutdown only to pop up five minutes later with a new domain.
This is actually a critical flaw IMO in federated applications as a whole. Not being able to change domain names makes your entire platform (as an instance runner) tightly coupled to the initial decision you make when first setting up the instance.
I think its called "redundancy L"