An update:
- fmhy.ml is gone, due to the ongoing fiasco with mali government taking all their .ml domains back
- As such, lemmy.fmhy.ml is also gone, we are currently exploring ways to refederate (or somehow restart federation entirely) without breaking anything substantial
- We have backups, so don’t worry about data loss (you can view them on other instances anyway)
Currently, we have fmhy.net and are exploring options to somehow migrate, thank you for your patience.
Man this is all so interesting to see so many unique situations testing the Fediverse to see how it holds up.
let’s hope they’re interesting because it’s novel and the problems were there with other solutions just solved ages ago rather than the alternative: “so many unique situations” because there are a litany of “oops didn’t think of that” moments that will continue to crop up
IMO the real takeaway is that a big instance disappeared overnight and yet here we all are on the fediverse talking about it.
Lemmy has had such a crazy month and a half. Insane growth, XSS injections, DDOS attacks, admin takeover, domain name seizures. What a wild ride
and still better than using official Reddit app (and still better than Reddit overall) lol
And we’re still here, going strong. Long live the Fediverse.
Facts. And such drama does make Lemmy more appealing in a way
My boy Lemmy is growing up!
That’s how every service starts. Let’s keep going
Welcome to the real world
I posted this on another thread about this, but I’ll repost it here:
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.
WIll this also affect all other .ml domains? Or is this some anti-piracy thing? (I don’t know fmhy, but from the name I guess it’s about piracy.)
It seems to be Mali just wanting their domains back, in which case it’s uncertain times for all .ml domains.
rip lemmy.ml
Good thing join-lemmy is safely tucked away in a .org domain.
This is extremely bad timing for Lemmy (if it ends up happening), but also a good example of how federation makes the entire social media landscape more robust. Had this happened to a centralized service it would be devastating.
Not really. Most centralized services are accessible via multiple domains, e.g. for different countries. This would just disable one of them, but users could still use another to log into their accounts. For the Fediverse it “disables” an entire instance, cuts it off from federation and locks out users.
Lets not put a positive spin on a situation that exposes a weakness of the current system. The federation protocol needs to be able to handle these things gracefully, like propagating domain changes and migrating accounts between instances!
If it was always going to happen, now isn’t really a bad time. Sure, a month ago would have been better, but people still haven’t been here that long. If I wind up needing to migrate, and lose my current account, oh well. No big loss. I imagine others feel similar.
lemmy.ml is still up as of right now. Possibly they contracted a subscription to the domain name to keep it up. They had to do something to retain it otherwise the site would be unreachable. If lemmy.ml does have to change names it will be a hassle since I’ve got a good number of community subscriptions there.
This wouldn’t happen to an instance with a regularly subscribed domain name. Problem is the .ml domains were free and the associated country decided to claim them back. The risk of using a free top level domain is something that should have been considered. I don’t think it’s worth the risk versus the cost savings considering how difficult it is to migrate a Lemmy instance.
It’s just the domain, though. That’s not a big deal to change.
Federation connections are by domain name, so … it is a big deal
Right. This will basically make nearly every /c live in .world as all of the .ml /c’s go defunct. That, or Beehaw, which is walled off from everyone else.
(Side note… my work’s firewalls block everything *.ml – and that’s the only thing that saved me from creating my account there)
The instance is known by its domain name in the federation network. If that domain name changes, it’s like starting a new instance from scratch.
Sounds like a complicated project to migrate communities and posts and users to a new instance without breaking something.
Think about all the links to lemmy.ml
Currently, activitypub identity is tied to domain name. Mastodon support migration as long as the old domain is still up during the migration process, but AFAIK Lemmy doesn’t even have a process to migrate an instance to a new domain yet.
Someone should tell Lemmy devs and send them a crate of coffee because it’ll be a race to implement domain migration before all .ml domains got shut down.
Shall I make an account in another instance?
Never hurts. Could be a good opportunity to look around the threadiverse and see if you find anything interesting.
However, as it only affects the domain, I expect the Lemmy developers will manage to migrate user data to the new domain should lemmy.ml go down. So your account won’t just disappear, but it might go down for a while. It might also affect communities hosted on .ml domains, as followers from other instances will not have the correct path any more.
I understand it as the Mali government is taking back all the domains after a subletting contract ran out. A lot of sensitive emails that should go to .mil (US military) has been typo-sent to .ml-addresses instead. Here’s some more reading.
(I am very tired here and might have misunderstood everything, please correct me if I am wrong)
Perhaps the military should have a system in place to not allow emails to be sent outside of very specific TLDs if it’s that sensitive? And perhaps have an automated contact book, instead of relying on someone typing out the to: address manually to be able to make that mistake in the first place?
Seems like some very basic security measures for something so serious.
What about lemmy.ml? Can govt just take their domain?
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.
First I join Vlemmy.net and then FMHY.ML… I am afraid whatever instance I join next will collapse 😭
I’m sorry but for the good of all instances I’m afraid you will need to become a lurker 😔
Are you me? Same instances, same order…
…same fear.
I also joined vlemmy.net and it came down between fmhy.ml and sh.itjust.works. Guess I got lucky!
what happened with vlemmy?
The instance up and disappeared right after it’s admin said they were going g to defederate with another instance. There was no warning it was just gone the next day.
There is lots of speculation around it, but I think the admin got scared of the implication that their servers still held content from the other instance that was illegal in their country.
oh thanks.
glad to see them not go down the vlemmy path
What happened to vlemmy?
Nobody really knows for sure. It just sort of disappeared one day with no warning.
Is this going to be an unsolved mystery of the Internet? A spooky Fediverse legend?
Damn, lemmy.zip, eh? If that instance is public, I don’t see that being a good thing.
Tons of businesses, people, etc, are all banning .zip and .mov TLDs for security purposes. I’ve personally banned all those domains from my network as well.
Bold move.
What’s the issue with those TLDs?
See https://youtu.be/GCVJsz7EODA and https://youtu.be/V82lHNsSPww
There are a few problems, but I believe the biggest issue is that .zip and .mov are valid and common file extensions, and it’s common for people to write something like ‘example dot zip’ or ‘attachment dot mov’ in emails, tweets, etc. Things like email clients have features where they automatically convert text that looks like a web address into clickable links. So now, retroactively, all those emails etc suddenly have a link, where they used to just have text, and the domains that are equivalent to those previously benign file names are being purchased by nefarious actors to exploit people unaware of the issue.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/GCVJsz7EODA
https://piped.video/V82lHNsSPww
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Yeah, you have a point. I may go block those TLDs tonight.
i don’t doubt there have been a lot of cases of those tlds used for scams but i haven’t been negatively effected by this instances domain name.
feel free to read the discussion about it here though
I can’t open that link because I block .zip domains lol
Re-federation is probably possible. BUT! You’re going to always have problems with older content. Case in point my federation error messages is at 2300. About half are failed requests on fmhy.ml.
So for re-federation what’s needed:
1: Remote instances should unsubscribe all users from any fmhy groups. They’re dead now. They can only announce that and hope they do. I reckon when their errors start ramping up (as I saw yesterday) they will be looking into why. Probably to help de-federate from the old URL
2: The fmhy instance should unsubscribe all users from all remote groups but keep a note of the groups while identifying as fmhy.ml. Then once on a configuration for the new domain re-subscribe to each one. The first step should hopefully stop them trying (and failing) to federate new events to the old URL. The second step should trigger federation with the new one.
3: They could be able to keep the DB. But I am not sure in what places the old domain might be stored in the DB and what would need fixing there. Also not sure if they’d need to regenerate keys. Not sure if they’ll see the key was attached to the old domain and refuse to talk to the instance.Now what’s going to be a problem? Well ALL the existing content out there has references to users on the old domain. It’s VERY hard to fix that. Like every instance would need to fix their database. Not worth it. But, whenever someone likes/unlikes or comments or whatever a post made from fmhy.ml then there’s a good chance a remote instance will queue up a retrieval of:
1: User info about the poster/commentor/liker
2: Missing comments/posts for a like/comment eventAnd those will fail and error log. I don’t think there’s a way around that aside from editing the whole database on every instance. Again, IMO not worth it.
Would be a nice federation feature if, provided you could identify with the correct private key, announce a domain change which would automatically trigger the above in federated instances, or at the very least some kind of internal redirect for outgoing messages.
So why is lemmy.ml still working?
At least I see posts from their instance, like this one https://midwest.social/post/1290001
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.
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.
Is Mali gov just removing all DNS records without warning?
No respect for existing contracts, or at least some heads up a couple of months earlier.Governments just love doing stuff whenever they can, because what are you gonna do? This is a country under a military junta, there is no legal process to get back the domain.
I’ve been seeing posts from users on lemmy.ml though? How’s that possible
They are probably paying for the domain
have fmhy not paying for theirs?
No, that is the crux of the matter. They used freedom, which offered .ml for free.
I’d like to think FMHY was true to their name and didn’t pay for the domain.
Posting here for visibility as I guess most people on Lemmy are not on Firefish/Mastodon
Frick, my website uses .ml and it’s gone.
Are you using the free domain deal, or are you paying for your .ml domain? I suspect they only revoking those unpaid .ml domains.
