this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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This is unfortunately only possible if you still own the original domain. Think about it this way: if you could migrate domains without proving you own the original, then what's stopping a bad actor from migrating any domain they want? Keep in mind that Federated servers rely on DNS to verify who's who -- they don't have a backup system for deciding trustworthiness.
Yes, there's no technical reason Lemmy has to rely on DNS to establish trust (aside from the fact that changing this would require a massive rearchitecting effort), but why shouldn't it? It's possible to switch to a different trust system (i.e.: public/private keypairs), but that doesn't actually change the nature of the problem -- people can still lose control of the private key and blow the whole system up (and, arguably, this is a lot more likely to happen than permanently losing a domain).
So, login credentials aren't actually tied to the domain name at all. A user like
[email protected]
is simply known asexample
to the server internally. The server doesn't particularly care if it lives atlemmy.ml
ormicrosoft.com
-- if userexample
shows up and gives the right password, they're allowed to log in. What I'm trying to say is that -- assuming that the user database isn't destroyed -- login info would probably carry over without any special effort needing to be taken at all.The identity problem you allude to is not exclusive to this scenario. Let's use
lemmy.ml
as an example: where did the domain come from? The Mali government. Does this mean that the Mali government ownedlemmy.ml
before it became associated with the Lemmy project? At the risk of oversimplying: yes, pretty much! Prior to 2019, the government of Mali could have created "fraudulent" Fediverse posts under your username, /u/[email protected].With that being said, it's kind of a silly concern. Despite being partially distributed, Lemmy is not a read-only database (i.e.: not a blockchain). There's nothing stopping the current domain owner from more-or-less completely undoing vandalism from a prior domain owner by simply asking the other federated servers to delete that fraudulent content. Keep in mind that the domain is not the server; the original operator keeps all of the original data even if they lose the ability to host that data under the original domain.
This is not a problem unique to Lemmy. If Google forgets to pay for
gmail.com
, then suddenly a lot of email addresses become untrustworthy. This isn't a privacy issue because your old emails don't leave Google's servers. It is a trust issue, however, since the new owners can now impersonate anygmail.com
address and receive any new email that was intended for the original owner.Not to downplay how catastrophic this scenario would be... but I don't think there's any law on the books which would legally obligate Google to operate
gmail.com
until the end of time. Nothing lasts forever and eventuallygmail.com
won't be controlled by Alphabet Inc. anymore -- that's just how time works. Those bothered by this uncertainty can instead choose to host their own mail server (or Lemmy instance) on their own domain -- this won't last forever, either... but at least you're in control now.~~Just FYI: Much like Reddit, comments continue to exist even when the author deletes their account. The user must explicitly delete each individual comment before deleting their account if they want it all taken down.~~ EDIT: This is not actually currently the case, though as far as I can tell the stated intent is to prefer anonymizing comments over deleting them when deleting an account (source). I don't really get this complaint in the first place, actually... surely both kinds of content would get lost when a user deletes all of their data, right? There's no button that says "delete all of my stuff, except for the shitposts".
Your Gmail example is very funny because if anyone actually tried to do it, they would effectively DDoS themselves.
Governments could do it effectively.
I'm suggesting a whitelist, that each peer has to put in a substitute list of vlemmy.ml==vlemmy.ml to re-federate.
That is NOT how the testing code of lemmy_server tests things, nor how the GitHub front page advertises Lemmy.
I don't see any inherent problem with that suggestion, though it does create something of a sticky situation with things like canonical links. It also kind of goes against what I've so far perceived as a "low-maintenance" operations ethos from the project maintainers, so I'm not totally sure if they'd greenlight it. Technically quite doable, though.
I meant to say vlemmy.ml=vlemmy.net in example
~~I'll cite my source, then: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/commit/1de7a08d973c1079b36e13e087960cc5cd1b345c .~~
EDIT: scratch that, I now see that the stated intent is to retain anonymized comments as Reddit does, but that the functionality is not yet implemented in the main code release for reasons that seem triage-related rather than a change in plans.
You cite a conversation from November 4, 2022.
A Febuary 6, 2023 comment from developers https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2624#issuecomment-1419559651 says "The correct way privacy-wise, is to delete your account through your profile settings, which overwrites all your content to remove any info."