Now that we see things like this can happen, maybe we can make it easier to resolve going forward.
this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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Does this have anything to do with the whole email thing from the American military? According to the financial times, there are about 117.000 emails send to .ML addresses instead of .MIL..
Somewhat related. Basically, the management of the .ml TLD are being handed back to Mali government, and they seem to revoking.ml domains left and right.
I suspect they're revoking registration for .ml domains that was registered for free. the company that originally managed .ml domains had a free domain offers where you could register any .ml domain for free, the caveat is you don't have the ownership right to that free domain. Maybe Mali government doesn't honor such free domain registration and wish to revoke them all.
Prolly a noob question but why was the .ml TLD chosen in the first place?
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So why is lemmy.ml still working?
At least I see posts from their instance, like this one https://midwest.social/post/1290001
They may not have taken the lemmy.ml domain back yet, but because the different instances are federated, you'll still be able to see contents from an instance that's gone.
lemmy.fmhy.ml is pirate friendly, lemmy.ml is not. Maybe the Mali government suddenly decided they don't like piracy because... reasons? Maybe the Somalian pirates pissed them off???
I doubt they care about such things.
Because this caught everyone by surprise or was there some indication that things would just continue business as usual? The registrar has known the contract ended since it was signed 10 years ago, I would figure this would have been accounted for.
IDK, but registrars are generally shitty and exploitative. I'd be surprised if they volunteered that info
But they only took the domain name, not the server? So it should be no issue to just get another domain, change a bit of config on the system and web server, and be up and running in no time?
Not that easily, no. With ActivityPub your user ID is tied to the instance URL. If you subscribe to a community for example, when that community tries to "honor" your subscription by sending you updates of what is happening, it'll go to that .ml domain and be lost.
There's no official supported way to change your instance domain other than to start fresh. They might be able to do something hacky such as change all of the domains in the database and while locally that might appear to work, I don't know if it would work across the federation.
I do know on the instance I run, I accidentally broke the webserver config for one of the ActivityPub endpoints and the result was that when I sent out comments, it never actually got federated / published yet I can still see them from my instance. New subscriptions also didn't work. It was as if I effectively shadow-banned the instance by accident.
Sure, but depending on which timezone they are in, it could be nighttime for them
Thanks for that, was concerned about keeping my subscription to that community. Keep us posted and let us know where you end up so I can change over my community subscription.
Anyway I think the lesson learned here is don't use free TLDs. Lemmy is not at all designed to deal with domain name changes.
I migrated, but I would happily rejoin under a different tld.
Is there some news coverage on the mali governments actions? I couldn't find anything on my quick google search
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It was good while it lasted and they managed to keep it going longer than my first instance (two days)
Not all instances are created equal however one I tried to sign upto their email verification didn't work and others just didn't bother to activate my account for whatever the reason.
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Hello! I'm new to Lemmy, could someone break this down like I'm 5 and explain what it means for the people who were already on there?
Only instances with a ".ml" at the end of the name may or may not be affected. Lemmy is a collection of instances so the loss of a few will not cripple the whole thing. Content over the whole is not greatly affected.
If your home log-in instance is one that's affected, you'll have to find a new one. You'll know right away because the instance will be unreachable. Not a big deal, last time I looked there was over 1200 instances to chose from.
Another consideration is any communities living on an affected instance may have issues. All communities are common to Lemmy, but each originates from a particular instance. We've not yet seen a major instance go down so I don't know how Lemmy deals with communities getting orphaned like that.
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This is why we host our instance on a .org. Honestly another huge blow for Lemmy. It doesn't really inspire confidence in the platform. Hopefully after enough time passes smaller instances like us and the bigger ones left will have help up a good track record to inspire confidence again.
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