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.
rip lemmy.ml
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.
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.
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.