If this was a planned takeover by the government, why was there no notification sent in time? Why is lemmy.ml not shut down in parallel?
this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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There was a report in the beginning of June that things started looking weird. The registration of new .ml domains shut down in the beginning of the year.
In short, the Mali government just gave some random 3rd party a ten-year contract to hand out the domains for free, which the third party did without too much care or attention. It would have been up to the third party to notify domain owners, but as they're not paying and probably don't even have contracts themselves, there was little incentive to do so.
As far as I can understand, it relates to the US military scandal only indirectly: As the .ml domains are now returning to the government of Mali, it becomes a lot more problematic that the US keep directing their emails there, and the person in charge of managing the domain went public about the security threat.
Good timing for Reddit …. Wait….
I initially started on Lemmy.ml but decided to look for smaller instances. Not only just to be safe for stuff like this, but also to find a tighter community. I found an instance dedicated to the area I grew up around and have been really happy with that move.
I’m happy with the app because I would get suspicious every time the link changes again… pffff
What happens when it goes down, will all of the posts be gone?
This is precisely why my experiments with servers and internet technology stop whenever a dns is mentioned.
If i need to pay a subscription or otherwise rely on a centralized entity its not independent hosting and my interest in it disappears instantly.
Eh, you can self host your name system though. OpenNIC does exactly that. The problem is convincing other people to use your resolver instead of using ICANN.
I'm kind of curious about how you think the internet works.
It works very different from how i would want it to work for sure. I specified internet technology for a reason though. The creative limit i put on myself is that all systems should remain fully independent with the exception of hardware requirements. Everything remains local for now.
That's a pretty specific requirement but luckily you can host your own VPN and access it on your device and then access the service you're hosting via a local address. So if you do run into this again know that there is a way to circumvent the need to rely on *checks notes* DNS.
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