Welp that answers a lot of why all .ml are down

the argument for .ml domain has always been absurd to begin with. So it's free but the price you pay is that it's being run by Mali. I'd just drop 8$/year tbh, that's not a hill you want to die for. Also you harm your project by being SEO punished for using spam-associated TLDs like this. One of the reasons original Lemmy took so long to adopt until Reddit's API drama. Pretty dumb ngl.

If i remember right it was also "free to register but insanely expensive to renew once they start to see traffic"
- Renewal costs are my primary consideration when picking domains. Subscription fees is how your money disappears when you're not looking.

This brings a disturbing thought to mind.. if an instance domain name like foo.bar lapses and someone else snaps the domain up (or of it gets stolen) can the new controller plop Lemmy on a server and be instantly federated? If so what kind of damage could they do?

No, the signatures wouldn't match.
- That's an assumption that lemmy will quit federating with a server that does not match.
  And what signature are we talking about anyway? Is not certificates...
This is why you don't let your domain registration lapse. It's not the only way computers on the internet verify each other's identity, but a hell of a lot of internet security features are based around domain names, so keeping yours functioning is a very big deal.
- Domain registration ≠ internet security. Root of trust is in cryptographic keys, not domains. DNS is not the security cornerstone you make it out to be. PKI says hi!
ICANN has an Expired Registration Recovery Policy (ERRP) that requires your registrar to give your domain a 30-day grace period before deleting the records. ERRP also requires them to shutdown your DNS resolutions 8 days before deletion.
You’d have to be really mismanaging your domain if you miss all the required email reminders and don’t notice your domain has been non functional for a couple of days.
- I think Microsoft and Google have both done it, but what do they know? 🤣

Using .ml was stupid in the first place. No need to try to be a special snowflake by using a sketchy TLD.

It's one of the 5 TLD (now 4 I guess) that are free. The others being .tk, .ga, .cf and .gq
We need free TLDs.
- I'm aware. Using it for something like this is stupid.
- wow I didn't even know that was a thing! This is useful to know, thanks :D
But- But- But the memes of a Marxist-Leninist instance!!1!
- Commies punching the air right now
- They should check if .cia is open if they're want to switch over to something more fitting.
I wonder if it was done on purpose after it came out that the Pentagon had typo'd ".ml" instead of '.mil' and exposed a lot of sensitive emails...
- Highly doubtful much of anything majorly sensitive got leaked. Firstly even unclassified DoD emails are encrypted by default. Secondly anything classified isn't even on a network that can talk to normal email, it's either 100% point to point encrypted or on an airgapped network. If I hopped on SIPR (DoD Secret-level internet) and emailed a normal email address it simply wouldn't work.

Out of curiosity, other than fmhy.ml, lemmy.ml, and lemmygrad.ml, what other Lemmy instances were using .ml domains? Also, how are the latter two still running but fmhy.ml isn't?

edit: This has triggered a chain of comments I wasn't expecting. I'd appreciate it if someone can answer on a technical level. Is the latter two using a different registrar or name server which is why it still works for them?

Why are so many instances using .ml anyway?
- AFAIK, lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml use it because the ml can also stand for "Marxist-Leninist", and the two primary maintainers of Lemmy are Marxist-Leninists . Not sure about the others though.
- I think it's because ML is a popular shorthand for 'Marxist-Leninist' since they mostly seem to be communist servers
- It was free
- I'm guessing because it's sort of an alliteration on lemmy?
- It was free, and anonymous I guess
- So they can support Russia by proxy.
I know a ton about DNS and its technical functionality, not necessarily the regulations guiding registrars, but the technician in me says your TTL (how long other servers wait until asking where xyz.ml points to) hasn’t expired, maybe? Perhaps the government administration process simply hasn’t executed any action against those particular registrars yet?
I never liked TLDs that are from random islands or less than stable countries and there are so many great TLDs available now, I simply don’t see the reason to use such obscure TLDs just for the marketing factor.
- Thanks for answering. I figured it was a registrar thing. How bad do you think the situation will be for other .ml domains?
  I'm guessing fmhy.ml was using Freenom but lemmy.ml and lemmy.ml were using a different domain registrar, hence the situation right now.
- I never liked TLDs that are from random islands
  I remember reading somewhere that Tuvalu gets like 10% of their entire yearly income from Twitch.
  I now pronounce Twitch as Twitch dot Tuvalu, but I get weird "huh?"s when I say it like that.
You can see all but posts and comments won't be on their server until back online that are a few it went down. So I can visit my communities like https://lemmy.fmhy.ml/c/artwork that I mod. I can see it but nothing will happen until it comes back online. That's what understand at least.

Man, hacking, DDOS and now this. The fediverse just can't catch a break...

Resiliency is the strongpoint.
If Reddit shuts down, all of Reddit dies.
Same with Facebook, YouTube, etc. is that highly unlikely? Well, yeah, but still nonzero. The fediverse offers resiliency in this regard, and no one person has the ability to shut it down. Even if all instances decide to shut down, new instances can still be spun up.
- If the communities you like to read and post to are down, then Fediverse is effectively down for you. Thus it doesn't offer any additional resilience, it's not a P2P system.
Would help if users spread out over all the running servers because problem is just a few lemmy servers have all the users. For example the instance I run would be a simple proxy to use for all the content and then would mitigate issues when a big server had problems since just parts of the fediverse would be affected from the users pov.
- I feel like communities are the bigger problem here. And not one that's easily solved.
  If users from multiple instances come together in communities, those communities are still centralized on a single server. So if something happens to that server, or if your instance defederates with it, the whole community goes with it.
  The alternative would be to have tons of duplicate communities spread over many instances, but that's a bad user experience.
- At this stage in the game, I'm not even sure how to evaluate the trustworthiness of instances. Which also applies to the one I'm currently on. I'd like to assume everything is good, but admins do have power that can be abused, like visibility of IP addresses, access to accounts, access to passwords (reusing passwords is bad but especially don't do it here and certainly don't use the same password for your email associated with your account).
  Facebook abused those powers (zuck even bragged about being able to see everyone's passwords, emails, private messages, pictures), so did Reddit (though more with shadow banning or quietly removing/restoring posts).
  Fediverse instances are just run by random people as far as I can tell. I'm sure there's some that should absolutely be avoided and I'm sure that there's some that are perfectly fine. But I don't have a clue how to determine which list about specific instance is in, otherwise I'd love to join someone's small instance.
  Edit: oh and that only goes into whether the admin is acting in good faith or intends to be abusive. Then there's the question of whether the admin is competent enough to run a server without it getting pwnt and giving others access to that same information and capabilities.
- the problem is most users fear that if they choose a small instance, that it goes down random more likely and their account and everything else is gone. if you choose a bigger instance it feels less likely that the admin of the instance just says fuck it and kills the server random for whatever reason.
  as long accounts can't be easy transfered and are maybe even safe somehow without their instance, people will choose the instance that feels the most secure to them. and when i looked at the available instances.. most looked not really long term secure. most did look like they are random ideas of people and they could vanish any second into the void. so i as an example did choose lemmy.world. seemed the most safe option with the best features (nsfw allowed, a lot of users and a big instance)
- Does that really scale though? The load on a server is not dependent on the number of users, but on the number of communities from other server that the sum of user is subscribing to.
  Which means if you have a server for 100 users, you still need to pay for the 1000s giant communities that those users are subscribing to, as they are being copied over in your server.
  So if you have a few mega server like Lemmy.world, they each pay say 10000£ in hosting a month (number taken out of my hat), which is fine because they have as many users that can contribute to it financially ( via donations, ads etc.). But small servers won't be able to support that load and will ultimately close.
  That sounds like a design flaw if you ask me but i did not see anyone mentioning it so maybe i'm misunderstanding.
- I'm on it 😁, well at least one little instance more (just gotta make the email stuff work, over OVH if I can do that).
and that's just the first month
I cant believe this is just coincidence. This is coordinated.

Hi, professional DNS engineer here! if anyone has any questions about the inner workings of DNS or top level domains, ask away! (THIS IS MY MOMENT)

Why is it always DNS?
- Because DNS is the user-facing part of the whole system. There is plenty of trouble with everything else, but you usually don't see that as a user. Also it's a hierarchical system with big providers/governments giving and taking names as they see fit, so there is always the possibility to get screwed.
- Because its always DNS
- Because it's the least-likely position to be staffed by a company. It's the "least important" person to have.... until it breaks. Often a company relies on routing-switching engineers to do DNS instead of hiring a dedicated DDI engineer (DNS, DHCP, IPAM). It saves money in the short term, but when shit hits the fan... no one knows how to fix it because DNS is really easy until it's not. DNS is super simple at a basic level. But it goes way deeper than most people realize.
Well that sounds like my dream job, unfortunately this issue in particular is more of a Lemmy problem, not a DNS problem. See: https://lemmy.nrd.li/comment/190200 for the explanation of why you cant just transfer domains with Lemmy.
- Also, if you're genuinely interested in this field, first you should enter the world of enterprise network engineering. Get Security +, CCNA, and PCNSA. With those certs in hand (and knowledge in your brain), apply to jobs as a network support engineer. Do the work for a few years. Learn BIND. Learn Infoblox. Focus on learning DHCP and subnetting. Learn DNSSEC & IPv6. Experiment with a Pi Hole. Set up a home lab. Apply to jobs with DNS. Start living the good life. This takes about 10 years if you learn fast and are good at interviews.
- Ah, thanks for the info! I have no idea how Lemmy stuff works. I only became aware of Lemmy last month.
When I was talking my cyber security / ethical hacking class, we learned how to do zone transfer. The concept never stuck and I basically "copy" from my friend. So what exactly is a DNS Zone Transfer?
- Friday I was doing a zone transfer! What are the odds?
  A zone transfer is like moving houses, except for an authoritative zone.
  In DNS, we have what's called an authoritative zone. That means the device hosting the "resource records" (all the data that DNS passes around) is the "ultimate" answer. I.e, it's not cached data. It's not a hosts file. It's not a recursive answer. It's the real deal.
  When you want to move the authoritative zone to another server, you do a "zone transfer" that means the new server will copy all the resource records over TCP from current authoritative zone. The reason you may want to do this instead of manually hand-jamming it is that many large organizations have, sometimes, hundreds of resource records (last month I coordinated a zone transfer that was over 1000 records!).
Could users set a temporary entry in their hosts file pointing the .ml domains to public IPs in order to regain access to their account if they needed to?
Can Lemmy federate to an IP address directly or will the settings only accept an fqdn?
Will a Lemmy instance work behind a reverse proxy.
Thanks for taking the time to answer questions.
- Yes. Unless there's some kind of crazy domain-level hi-jinks involved with Lemmy (I am not versed in Lemmy), pointing directly to the IP will work if you bypass it by spoofing your DNS (Hosts file, for example).
  I don't know how Lemmy federation works, sorry :(
  See #2
  Sorry that I couldn't answer more of your questions.
- There are several problem with this including total lack of SSL without the proper cert for that other domain, also Lemmy.ml's IP seems to be running a reverse proxy so the internal IP that we would want to connect to is not visible to the world this is common for web security, the owners must set allowed domains and ports in their config file.
  If none of that was a problem Lemmy itself does not do well with changing domains, as highlighted here: https://lemmy.nrd.li/comment/190200
Woot we're saved.
Why is it always dns
What's the point of alternative DNS roots? Can they be a thing to mitigate DNS related failures (though lemmy.ml is back online, so I guess that wasn't it)?
- An alternative DNS root is where someone other than IANA sets up a root zone. At the end of the day, root zone authority is technically not "hard coded". It's a terrible idea to set up an alt root or to use one for these reasons:
  Security. This is the biggest one. DNSSEC works via setting up Trust Anchors with the root zone and chaining down the tree all the way to the recursive DNS server. DNSSEC doesn't work if anyone in there doesn't have a trust anchor for the root zone. Additionally, if that root zone is untrustworthy, you can effectively have DNS poisoning happen at the root level. Imagine having two google.com's based on which root zone (and therefore walking two separate trees) you ask.
  It encourages dividing the internet. The two largest Alt zones are Russia's (RNDNS) and China's (.chn). RNDNS exists as a continuity plan in case the rest of the world decides to cut them off of the internet. China's is part of a hare-brained plan to "reinvent the internet under IPv9" (an idiotic plan that sounds even more crazy than Iran's supposed "quantum computer")
  Pointing to a different root zone can cause a lot of headaches for diagnosing DNS issues when they aren't coming down from the same root zone. It can cause different answers (and a parallel tree).
  To answer your second question, they are not good for acting as a way to mitigate DNS failures. No domain servers are going to be asking them in the first place, meaning no one can get there even if it does have the "correct" answer. If all 13 root servers went down simultaneously, the results would be catastrophic. But that's also why they're physically located around the world in many different countries in heavily secure facilities with many High-Availability servers (clone servers that instantly take over if there's a failure, the ultimate "hot" server)
  You wouldn't want to have a DNS server ask two root zones anyway. If it can't reach the root zones, then that needs to be addressed. You can't just ask a "less secure" server in case the primary doesn't work. That's just begging for a security breach via cutting off access to the primary root zones so that they "fail over" to the less secure ones.
Hi! When DNS servers are launched, they have to be purchased, correct? So in this case, did Mali file for the domain to be reclaimed somehow? Do you have an idea how that might work?
- I can answer this. The organization that says mali owns .ml gives the ownership country a lot of sway.
  So if the country of mali were to reach out formally to the organization and say "hey this domain violates our laws" they would take that very seriously and then work with the registrar & authoritative nameserver owner to handle the situation.
  I'm sure this isn't 100% accurate but 90-95 based on my work in a web hosting company
So, how some companies get right to sell TLDs? Can I start selling TLDs nowdays? It's just that they were there first and get all top level domains and now we have to pay for it?
Thanks in advance.
- They paid a huge amount of money to get a TLD
- Companies don't/can't sell TLD's. Only IANA can decide those. When the internet first started, .org, .net, .com etc. were handed out to non-profit organizations and the costs were purely to keep the servers running. Eventually though, when IANA decided to hand out country codes like .io (Indian Ocean), .cat (Catalonia) or .tv (Tuvalu), those countries rent their "desirable" names to private organizations that sell domain registrations for lots of money. In 2013, IANA decided to enact the gTLD auctions to help raise more money. Basically, if you wanted to (and had a lot of money & DNS engineers on staff), you could register any TLD you want provided you were willing to make a large donation to IANA. If someone else wanted it, they had to go into an action war over it. That's how we ended up with things like .party or .sport or .world cough Now-a-days, if you want a TLD, you'd have to convince IANA to give you one.... But good luck with that. They won't give you one unless you're some major corporation that can actually handle it. They also just don't give them out. Usually it's only when they really feel like more TLD's are needed. It's a very serious responsibility and mismanagement could accidentally DDOS a DNS root zone & impact the internet.
So why do we need the .com or .org or whatever at all? And the www. as well?
I remember when I had to type the whole http://www.cakefarts.com and now just cakefarts.com works. What changed? And what's next?
- The ".com" and ".org" and all other Top Level Domains are owned/controlled by some organization.
  Com and org are your original TLDs, so since they were around first you see them everywhere. At some point countries got their own TLDs so Mali got "ml" for example but Tuvalu got "tv". (Yes, technically ".tv" has nothing to do with television.) And a few years back there was open bidding for a bunch of new TLDs which is where ".sport" or ".dentist" come from.
  Anyone some entity owns/controls them and then can sell any word or domain under it. So if you want "greatgatsby.com" you have to talk to the ".com" owners. If you want "greatgatsby.sport" you talk to the ".sport" owners. Usually there is another company or agreement that groups these together so you can manage all your domains in one place.
  So anyways now you own a domain like "greatgatsby.sport", what do you want to host? Mail at "mail.greatgatsby.sport"? A website at world wide web aka "www.greatgatsby.sport"? Up to you.
  Over time, largely by convention "www" became where you put your website.
  From there you have two options, you can setup a redirect from "http://greatgatsby.sport" to "http://www.greatgatsby.sport" or you can do a little hosting "trick" and just make "http://greatgatsby.sport" return your website.
- To answer your other question: most likely, www.cakefarts.com is now accessible from cakefarts.com for one of three reasons:
  Your web browser automatically checks the A record "www" if "cakefarts.com" doesn't have an A record. A records are the records in a DNS server that says "this domain goes here"
  The site cakefarts.com put their website on cakefarts.com and placed a CNAME record called "www" that points to cakefarts.com
  cakefarts.com has an APEX record that points to www.cakefarts.com
  For the 'record', www is just a really common record name. There's nothing special about it. You could have dudebro.cakefarts.com or wwwwwww.cakefarts.com. It's up to the domain owner.
- They don't know unless the DNS server tells them. For example, a very popular webhost Akamai uses a complex DNS + web hosting suite (DNS edgesuit to be exact) to send that type of data to the web servers. It can also allow for many many other features.
How does the TLD get reclaimed? I'm assuming whoever was previously the "owner" of the .ml tld was on board and Mali didn't just come along and snatch it away?
- So here's the thing about TLD's, ownership of them is determined by IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority). They're basically my career's gods. If they tell me to jump, I ask "how high". They control the DNS root zone. Effectively, that's the actual top-level of ALL domains. If they decide to remove a TLD or reassign it, all you can do is lodge a complaint straight to their shredder. They're owned and operated by ICANN, a non-profit organization.
  Back in 2013, Mali allowed a private Netherlands company to "manage" (rent) their TLD, .ML Recently, that company (Freenom) got sued by Meta. Even though I don't really like Meta, as a network engineer, I don't like Freenom even more. They turn a blind eye to bad actors on the internet, refuse to investigate hackers/scammers/DDOSers, and generally refuse to play ball. They are a huge pain in the ass. Due to the lawsuit, IANA reassigned ML to Mali since they asked for it. At the end of the day you "cant" sell a country-level TLD. Mali was renting it to Freenom under the table. This happens a lot and IANA usually just looks the other way. .io for example is the freakin' Indian Ocean.
  So yeah, Mali didn't "snatch" it. They just asked IANA to reassign it and there isn't shit Freenom can do about it since they never "really" owned it in the first place.
We had a situation at a shared space here where an OpenWRT client device accidentally somehow managed to announce itself into the network in a way that its v6 local link address (fe80::) got inserted into /etc/resolv.conf as a third DNS option (with the first two being the ones from DHCP) and then served incorrect records when queried. What mechanism is that and were the engineers who designed that feature on drugs? Also, how can I tell my Linux system to not accept such announcements?
Why is it always DNS?

lemmygrad.ml and lemmy.ml are gone? So sad.

Anyway.

Unfortunately, it seems the tankies are gonna tank right on (over the bodies of students).
Best comment
both are up, but fmhy is down, maybe forever
both are still up, but fmhy.ml is down
Fmhy.ml is also gone.

Link to the actual post OP screenshotted: https://very.bignutty.xyz/notes/9hf13it1ced3b2za

Screenshots of text are not the way. The crappy “hey, a text thing I want to share, let me take an accessibility-poisoning screenshot and upload that graphic file like a psychopath instead of just copy/pasting either the link to the text or the text itself like a decent human being” routine needs to die with Reddit, we have to be better than that here.

Screenshots of text preserve the state of the text at the time it was seen...
Yes, it's not good for accessibility but it's a good way to quickly capture a moment in time.
(I would recommend perhaps also copy/pasting a synopsis for people who might be vision impaired etc)
- So copy/paste the text for your snapshot, and link to the original.
- Also, modern tools are getting pretty good at dealing with text embedded in images. It isn't ideal but this partially mitigates a large concern (accessibility). Rather than complaining about people taking screenshots maybe pressure should be placed on the screenshot tools, and image formats, to better capture the raw text exactly and embed it as extra data along with the image.
At the least, put the screenshot and the link in the post. We can do both, people.
- Yeah, this is the correct way, because posts often become inaccessible.
Screenshots stay with time, I hate it when I arrive a bit later and the link is already dead and I have no idea what it said.
- ..except when the image hoster suddenly dies and 10000s of Screenshots suddenly vanish from the internet and all howto's etc are killed by it
- If you can post an image, you can post text, right?
- Copy/pasted text stays with time too and doesn't have the issues that pictures of text do. Also hosted images disappear all the time.
- So copy/paste the text, and link the original.
  In the case of this post, the ability to go to the original and learn the further info added by the author in subsequent posts is of use.
I did share it. It's in the comments.
Yeah, it's 2023, just take a video of your screen and upload that like the kids all do now.
- And then play that video on your screen, take a video of that screen with your phone while shaking the phone around and mumbling over the audio, and upload that phone video to TikTok.
Yeah that's not gonna happen
Accessibility should be enhanced to read text from image. Enduser shouldn't care about how he should share an information. How hard is it to read a font from a text?

It's called a single-point of failure in Engineering.

Funny enough it wasn't even a technical one but a contractual one.

Maybe there is some kind of lesson here on the risk of delegating critical structural elements to 3rd parties that rent rather than own that which they're selling ...

Unfortunately that has always been the nature of TLDs
- It’s less sketchy if you pay for a domain through a reputable registrar
- Indeed... you never really purchase a domain. It's definitely more of a lease. And that's any tld.
It’s called a single-point of failure in Engineering.
For that instance, yes. For the whole of Lemmy, no. Everything else keeps on chugging along.
- Indeed.
  Imagine if this had happenned to a centralized system like Reddit...
I think its called "redundancy L"

Visited lemmy.ml : it is on.
When was it down ?

I just visited lemmy.ml as well and still up, however cannot get to lemmy.fmhy.ml in any app or browser.
Yeah. Lol all the people celebrating the demise of that nasty commie site. Also the admins created lemmy.

It was quite hard to find any information on this, so I will post what I found.

https://domainincite.com/tag/freenom

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/05/26/2121222/phishing-domains-tanked-after-meta-sued-freenom

That second link is less relevant but interesting.

Why is Meta suing Freenom?

Meta suing Freenom
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/03/sued-by-meta-freenom-halts-domain-registrations/
- The lawsuit points to a 2021 study (PDF) on the abuse of domains conducted by Interisle Consulting Group, which discovered that those ccTLDs operated by Freenom made up five of the Top Ten TLDs most abused by phishers.
  Oof. Also what a bizarre landscape where this comes out in 2021 and the only action on it is a private corporation personally suing them over a year later. Where's ENISA and EC3?

Why is Meta suing Freenom?

Freenom gives away domains, many of which are used by phishers and other bad actors. Meta is suing them for not being responsive to their complaints about this. And I guess the injury inflicted on their users by phishers.
- Wait, is it actually Feeenom's fault? Isn't it from whatever the server the malicious actions comes from?
  For example I use one of their domains along with a Digital Ocean droplet, and I used it briefly to increase my seeding ratio by portforwarding my Qbittorrent port, after several months I got a letter from DO (which is amusing because my country couldn't care less about torrenting lol) which I think is correct, I don't think this is Feeenom's fault.

A lot of people should be concerned about this for .me domains as well (Montenegro)

I think that's different because the .ml domain apparently was being given away for free by a registrar that wasn't responding to abuse complaints, and thus was being heavily abused.
...but if not, then holy shit what a mistake it was to register firstname@lastname.me as my primary email address.
- Proton also uses ch and com.

I was using .ml domains for my selfhosted services, since it was just an hobby and I didn't wanted to invest money on it. Apart from Freenom website being pretty unusable since I have memory, I've already had troubles renewing them last year and now they stopped working without any notice nor update from Freenom itself. Finally I decided to move to a payed domain from Infomaniak, since it's been more than a year I've been selfhosting and $10/year is a fair price for me.

But still without those free domains I wouldn't probably ever started selfhosting, and I guess a lot of other people like me wouldn't have experimented or spin up their projects if they had to pay for a domain from the beginning. So despite my hate for Freenom I guess I have to thank them and hope someone else (maybe a bit more "professional") will take its place in the future

The lawsuit points to a 2021 study (PDF) on the abuse of domains conducted by Interisle Consulting Group, which discovered that those ccTLDs operated by Freenom made up five of the Top Ten TLDs most abused by phishers.
Umm... Can we talk about how a private company is suing another private company over something that should be in the interest of the government/general public? Where are our agencies, where is Interpol/Europol or ENISA?

FYI I have made a tool that can backup / copy your account settings, subscriptions, and blocks to a new account: https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim

There are others out there as well if you look.

Obviously the loss of .ml communities would still be catastrophic to Lemmy, but at least your new account won't start from ground-zero, and you can be less effected by downtime by having 2 accounts with the same subscriptions.

Yeah this sucks for my small but growing community. Ive created an alternative instance elsewhere (on .world) but hopefully .ml doesnt go down forever.
So should I just go ahead and make an account somewhere else? Made mine like a month ago and just picked ml at random
- Doesn't hurt! You can always make another account.

Why was .ml selected to begin with?

.ml stands for Marxist/Leninist apparently. Communists try not to let idealism get in the way of practicality challenge(impossible)
To be fair this is a pretty crazy black swan event they couldn’t have possibly seen coming. But yeah, this is why novelty domain suffixes are novelties.
- It was totally possible to see coming. The .ml domain deal and its expiration was known far in advance and I've been seeing posts about it for months.
  This is 100% incompetence on whoever set up the site.
- Interesting ... I always wondered why the .ml. In my trade ML is mostly used to mean "machine learning", aka AI, but it didn't seem fitting here.
- No that's not true.. .ml is the TLD for Mali and lemmy.ml selected it because it was free.... This claim you're making is like people claiming AC/DC stands for anti-christ devil-child. No, it's electrical currents, hence the lightning bolt...
  With that said, they did censor anti-china rhetoric, had many pro-china trolls/brainwashed users, and started censoring words, including "bitch." So I'm not defending the instance. But this claim about what .ml means is just blatantly false! It's a country's TLD!
Free
- Considering the cost to host servers and develop both the backend and the Jerboa app, I dont think $10 a year on a .org would have ended the project?
Always thought it's a play on machine learning, but I'm most probably wrong.
- Many people said it was because "Marxist Leninist"

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/03/sued-by-meta-freenom-halts-domain-registrations/

Goddamn, looks like im switching registrars soon. Thanks for the link.

I can understand why refederation needs to be done manually, but I'm confused as to why transferring users and histories is a maybe. Web and database hosting are mutually exclusive from domain hosting/registration.

With ActivityPub all of the primary ids contain the domain of the hosting server. So if you lose your domain none of the other instances know that you're the authority on those communities, posts, comments or users. So essentially federation breaks with all of the old data.
- That seems really dumb given the technical aspects as well as the purpose of domains.

Personally I think more people should be aware of the evil company that is Freenom. (Not saying Meta is not evil.)

Or at least the people that unwittingly transact with them and give them attention / money.

What did they do?
- Overall a sketchy company. The most nefarious of their practices is seizing the "free" domains they give away when it becomes popular.
you say we should be ware, yet you provide no information.
thanks for nothing
- could have looked around this post or googled instead of being rude and being a lazy fuck

The domain bs is a interesting case of scummy practices in general, .tv was missused in a similar way with awful contracts, essentially scamming a already increadably poor country!

Didn't Tuvalu massively benefit from being assigned a TLD that is popular? I read they were able to build an airport with .tv money
- Yea, they managed to get it back at some point but it was under external control with close to no benefit for them for a long time!
- They reclaimed many domain rights and are now renting them out for big money, yeah. They were still scammed off by many.
There is also .io for the Indian Ocean territories. They seem to be fine with it. It is interesting they have problem with it. I wonder what the actual motivation is, because it can't be due to a lack of viable domain for businesses.
- The US and UK build a military base and established it with that ages ago so I am not surprised the current population is fine with it but they expelled the original population to do so! :/
TLDs are a non-tangible arrangement of characters that are defined by a committee at a whim. The countries they are given to have not contributed anything to make them worth more. I don't see how that can be seen as a scam when they don't get free money based on a random decision by someone outside of their country.
- That's not actually true, the guy who made them originally was from the west and those countries didn't contribute because they had no chance of any digital infrastructure yet but top level country domains use caracters from the correspinding countries name and those are all determind in the same way so you essentially use their name without their permission or based on scetchy and scummy legally binding agreements!

Umm with no warning whatsoever?? That's quite insane.

A week ago I literally read articles about how .ml was switching to the (Russian-influenced) Mali government in a week, and did not even think about how lemmy.ml would be affected

.ml was a terrible name anyways. People just kept saying everyone was a tannkie whether or not true. Not the image that's going to help you grow or your ideological goals imo

how does ML make people it's tankies?
edit: nvm comments lower say Marxist/leninist
- This hadn't even occurred to me. I saw it as millilitre!
…not even gonna lie, I thought it had something to do with machine learning at first.

this is why instances should be abstracted away as underlying infrastructure and the users don't have to think about "instances". accounts and communities are replicated across servers.

This is not the solution! Being able to pick a server to trust your data and content moderation with is a feature, not a bug.
What we do have to do is make this feature more resilient and easier to use. Like adding the ability to easily transfer accounts and communities between instances, or even change the domain name of an entire instance.
- no, you're misunderstanding. that shouldn't be how it works. there shouldn't be any difference between the software on each instance such that it make your data insecure. this is how bitcoin works. this is why anyone can spin up a bitcoin instance and have it start contributing to the bitcoin blockchain and you as a user don't have to "trust" that particular node. trust is built into the distributed software architecture. you don't "choose" a set of bitcoin nodes. you don't "choose" your CDN or DNS servers.
There are a few technical problems with that. First of all, the cost of each instance would become quickly unbearable since everyone has all the duplicated data.
Second problem, a malign entity could just come, create its own instance, spam everything and everyone with ads or whatever and suddenly every instance is full of that stuff. Also, how do you handle defederating in that case?
What has been proposed before instead was to make some kind of mega communities that gather all posts from communities with the same name across instances
- everyone has all the duplicated data.
  everyone does not have all the duplicated data. they only have the data that they need -- the data requested by a user who happens to be using some instance.
  handling defederating is a good point. there could be malicious nodes that would be damaging to the network. i suppose there could be a community-mainted ledger of known malicious nodes (similar to minecraft usernames of known hackers), and the admins of the servers would maintain a blacklist. (obviously you configure that your instance's blacklist would be automatically synced with this ledger)
  the mega community idea could be good. where is this being discussed?
I don't want to share an instance with the nutballs on the tankie instance or the nutballs on the fascist instance.
- to expound:
  the tankie instance or the nutballs on the fascist instance
  here you reveal a conceptual misunderstanding, or rather, a part of the lemmy architecture which i disagree with. there shouldn't be a concept of a "interest X instance" etc. it should be similar to a distributed storage model. so the concept of a community is not per-instance, it's just an abstract thing that exists in conceptual space.
- you already share water with them though. how is this any different? more seriously though, you already share internet infrastructure with them. the packets you just sent to make that comment could have been sandwiched between a "tankie" and a "fascist nutball". that's just the way it is man, there have always been crazy humans.
This was my thought as well. Before learning more about the fediverse, I thought things are distributed and are replicated across servers (much like how distributed storage and computing works). But apparently they're not. You still have to choose which instance you want to use as your "home", and your data and your contents stays in your home. Others get to look at your profile and contents thanks to ActivityPub.
I understand the needs for multiple instances (i.e., preferences for moderating concents, governance, etc.) But shouldn't the users and the user generated contents (arguably fediverse's valuable resources) should be safe-guarded by having redundancies in place across multiple instances?
Has there any work or effort on this?
- I thought things are distributed and are replicated across servers (much like how distributed storage and computing works)
  yes, exactly! when you use the internet, you don't manually choose which ISPs to route through. you can pick which DNS servers to use but you don't have to. when you use youtube, netflix, or facebook, you don't choose which CDNs to use.

This is why I have a .org.

I don't understand why they went with free domains in the first place. Freenom is known for being unreliable.

Unironic communists using ml as short form of marxist-leninist.

The Mali government taking control of the .ml tld probably has something to do with the fact that hundreds of thousands of US military emails have been accidentally sent to Mali by users who type .ml instead of .mil in the address field.

It's almost 100% because they were in violation of at least some of the content policies found here
It's just that the Fediverse now has enough global attention being paid to it that they're probably actually cracking down on enforcement. Probably something under the "Insults" or "Racism" content policy, since those are the most vague and poorly defined and highly likely to be "obvious" primarily to the country who is operating them, Mali.
- fmhy had pornography, which is banned for .ml domains.
- DROGUES? On my lemmy?

Is this because of the DoD typo leaks? Lol

- changeover provoked the leak.
  ~~that is nonsense. the leak was there before the change, but after the change consequences of the leak could be more dangerous.~~
  oh, you mean leak as in public knowledge of the problem and i am talking about the leak caused be emails ending up in wrong hands.
I wouldn't be surprised. That was a pretty major mistake, so I was already kind of expecting there to be some changes with the .ml TLD. Didn't expect this, though.
No, just the contract ended

Are .ml accounts going to disappear? Is .world "safer" (if you don't count the day accounts were compromised, because an exploit?).

Go with a .com ?
- I think any non-regional and non-special TLD is fine. Some have rules associated. I thought .movie had special rules about only lasting for a specific amount of time but it looks like I may have been wrong (not sure where I got the idea and I can't find anything to back that up). .us you have to be a US citizen for. .dev has the "rule" that it is HTTPS only because *.dev is in the HSTS always-on list by default but that's not related to the domain itself.
- or .xyz
- Why not ~~Zoidberg~~ .zip
  lol...put that nonsense domain to some use.
  Speaking of which... anyone want to register Appleinvoice.zip? Haha
Even better, join a smaller one to spread out and make use of the federated nature. Right now imagine lemmy.ml and lemmy.world for whatever reason go down. Basically whole Lemmy is kinda fucked because it's extremely centralized, even though decentralization is one of the points of Lemmy.
- We need a better way to advertise what servers to direct people to. Would be nice to circle through a big list of instances to evenly direct new users to
- People couldn't care less if it's centralized or not. People come for the community, not the tech behind it. Also people are lazy, they will use the easiest thing that comes up. Why should one go to another instance, if the one they are right now works great?
  I am not saying that this system is bad. I am just saying that people will always take the easiest option there is.
- This is kinda something that affects a lot of fedi services, mastodon has mastodon.social, lemmy has lemmy.world, matrix has matrix.org, etc

in confused. ml doesn't seem to be down anymore.

I’m new to the fediverse and not sure how it works just yet. Can someone help me understand? My account was created on Lemmy.ml, will it no longer work and I’ll have to make another?

I would make a lemmy world account personally, it's tough to say what will happen long term with .ml domains. Even if your account still works, it may by hampered getting posts from the rest of the fediverse. Worst case scenario you have account on two popular lemmy instances.
- I wouldn't bother with world honestly, it's the "main" instance now so it gets targeted a lot, I prefer sh.itjust.works for that reason.
I have main at Lemmy.ml but I created an alt at the KDE server and sync all my subscribed communities there
Permanently Deleted
Are you aware that ml in lemmy.ml stands for marxism-leninism and that the admins of your instance don't support any critique of the chinese government? I'm asking because I think a lot of new users chose lemmy.ml randomly - mostly because it was big - and if they knew this, many of them would have chosen differently.
- I had no clue. I was just tired of Reddit and when looking into Lemmy the .ml one came up first in the search. Guess I get to make a new one somewhere else.
- no one would, because people who already get it act like any of this makes sense
  there’s waaaaaaaaaaaaay too much nerding out over how it works, “federating”, and being open instead of being user friendly.
  wants to compete with reddit, but its accessibility on a big scale is near 0 with the current approach

Bummer, I was gonna make fmhy my main instance!

It was my main instance 💀
- Mine too...
  Now it's pawb.social. I wanted .social instance and this was the first in awesome-lemmy-instances repo on GitHub.
- Yep. Annoying I don't even remember all my subs etc.
it was my main instance literally like 2 weeks until this happened

That’s wild! But also not surprising?

Well kinda feels like my house burned down.

Hopefully the push towards some kind of direct migration comes on the feels of this.

Time for use the ip instead of a name

This would create the same issue every time you wanted to switch servers / server hosters and would make self hosting with a dynamic ip impossible
- I'm not sure that's true. Couldn't it just automatically broadcast your server's current correct IP to all servers it federates with each time it (the IP) changes (and if a server fails to find a federated server by the most recent IP in its records, have it query other federated servers for a more up to date IP.)

rip my website

So as far as the content of what was on that server goes, does it just go away as far as the broader Fediverse, or how does that work?

I like how this mastodon app you are using actually says its name inside the dynamic island

The chat is not mastodon but a different one. Yes I love Mona. Feels familiarans has a lot of options

Ah well that would explain why I couldn't join some community on one of those that popped in the new communities community a few days ago.

RIP.

Lots of folks come from other instances. It's actually encouraged to decentralized where possible!

Couldn't have happened to a worse bunch of people lol

Yep, I'd just like to say fuck communists and let's keep the Fediverse away from communist politics' bullshit.
Communists are only about a partial shit-tier above Nazis. Both are in the tiers of shit, shit birds of a feather.
- It's almost like all authoritarianism is bad.
- lol no

I just had to do this to get back on here... Does anyone know if there is a way to transfer posts like it says here?

They would have to. We can move our stuff

i paid freenom for my .ga domain... i still have it for some reason

So, the divolt instance is gone as well?

Major oof

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.

It's not a huge blow for Lemmy, I barely notice I'm not on Reddit anymore. I realize there are small niche subs that they don't have here, but that's not where Reddit makes their money anyway. People keep trying to ddos Lemmy, that alone should tell you that it's a threat.

Could they not just go with ".mali" as their governtal extension? It's only two more characters. Why mess with all of the existing .ml stuff on the internet?

The country codes are an ISO standard. IANA uses these for country TLDs, they don't set the standard.
Each country (well, actually an organisation in the country, usually a part of the government) gets its ISO-2 code (the two-letter code it is usually known by). So .ml has always belonged to the Mali government. For a time, they let a Dutch company run it, and the company allowed pretty much anyone to create .ml websites for free. At this time, the Lemmy software was created and its developers also started lemmy.ml as a test server. Anyway, the Dutch registrar's contract has ended and the .ml domain will now return to the Mali government. So the existing .ml stuff always existed in a domain that belonged to Mali; it is just that they are only now being asked to leave.

Mmh, wasn't .ml a commie place? Maybe everything went better than expected

Well I think some instances like lemmy.ml interpreted the domain as marxist-leninist, but over the whole web this will be the minority. Many websites covering machine learning use(d) that domain.
- Oh yeah I was talking about Lemmy.ml. Sucks for all the others

yet another example of why activitypub is kind of a terrible protocol for a platform like this.

- Why do you assume i'm saying it should be centralized? My annoyance is literally that it's too centralized!
Why? I don't quite see the relationship between losing access to a domain, and it being uniquely bad for activitypub.
- Because it means losing access to the content unless the operators go through the ardous process of moving to another domain, whereas with the matrix protocol the content would remain perfectly available and the only thing that happens when a server has domain issues is that the accounts and specific room alias become unusable.
  XMPP has the same issue because it also relies on one central server to host a room, whereas with matrix ALL involved servers replicate the room which means that there is no central server to go down, which is just objectively better for things like chats and forums.
Do you have a better protocol in mind, or any fixes that could be made to make ActivityPub better?
- The AT protocol that Bluesky runs on is designed to address this specific limitation of ActivityPub.
- Yes, the matrix protocol is very mature and perfectly suited for forums.

Maybe they can help us out and take down Lemmygrad while they're at it

I guess their pro-Russian military junta has the same interests as lemmygrad.