this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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Not really. Most centralized services are accessible via multiple domains, e.g. for different countries. This would just disable one of them, but users could still use another to log into their accounts. For the Fediverse it "disables" an entire instance, locks out users and cuts it off from federation.
Lets not put a positive spin on a situation that exposes a weakness of the current system. The federation protocol needs to be able to handle these things gracefully, like propagating domain changes and migrating accounts between instances!
I'm now wondering what happens if the Mali government (or someone else) begins using those domains with their own lemmy instance, potentially with malicious content.
Would the instances they've federated with begin ingesting and serving that content automatically? Or would that be blocked due to key mismatch?
I think they need the private key for the https certificate to do that
Afaik it is all connected to the domain name, so they could definitely start to impersonate any .ml instance. Other instances could detect that the signing key for federation messages changed, but that's about it. Their admins would probably have to block/defederate them manually.