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.
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.
This isn't really that huge of a blow, it's a learning curve sure but just because some people made dumb decisions on what TLD to use based on something they decided it means (and backtracked to say they chose it because it was free, I know) doesn't mean federated platforms don't work. Actually imo it points to the strength of federation that we can still be here using lemmy on our instances while they switch.
All this really did was teach instance owners (who this might be their first experience hosting things too btw) that you have to use a TLD that is more stable like a .org, .com, .net, etc over a "free" one, and this is afaik the first instance of something like this happening, so honestly they didn't have precedent to base this on before.
By no means did i mean that federated platform's wont work, far from it. Im more considering the reputational damage of the platform. For me all the .ml instances unresolvable. And it doesn't look good when the "official" instance is lost. If i were an outsider considering moving to lemmy and i saw vlemmy disappear, lemmy world get hacked, and .ml loosing their domains id be pretty hesitant on making the switch. Thats where i sit for the moment. Lets all hope we can get a good track record going now.
Exactly, IMO this has nothing to do with lemmy itself and everything to do with dumbass domain names.
Only one went down - most everyone else are still up.
This is the opposite of a blow. It directly shows the resilience of the fediverse.
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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?