Man this is all so interesting to see so many unique situations testing the Fediverse to see how it holds up.
this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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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
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
Yeah, they are actively working on functionality to migrate user accounts and other data between instances, so that they can use that functionality to migrate everything on an instance to another instance.
Since migrating data affects all the replicated data on other instances as well, I guess when they migrate lemmy.ml somewhere else, all of Lemmy will be down for a day or two, being just overloaded with all the migration stuff.
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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)
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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
My boy Lemmy is growing up!
and still better than using official Reddit app (and still better than Reddit overall) lol
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Posting here for visibility as I guess most people on Lemmy are not on Firefish/Mastodon
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.
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Yes, that's reassuring. Also, nice to see their main website, I never actually noticed it existed
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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 😔
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I’ve been seeing posts from users on lemmy.ml though? How’s that possible
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 event
And 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.
If I'm running lemmy.world, I wouldn't unsubscribe my people. I'd wait for that instance to move to a new domain and just find/replace in the database.
Not every instance needs to migrate fmhy. Some can just leave that stuff broken. If the biggest half dozen instances migrate manually, fmhy would be able to keep most of their subscribers.
I do wonder how often instances will keep looking for fmhy without intervention. Seems like tooling to migrate or discontinue an instance wouldn't be too difficult to build. At least it wouldn't if they didn't have a million other things on their plate.
We could use a few less third party clients and more work on Lemmy itself. Unless you're going to bring over your userbase like RiF and Apollo can.
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What about lemmy.ml? Can govt just take their domain?
I think in theory yes, since the .ml tld is now managed by the Mali government instead of some guy that had an agreement with them.
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.
They just handed off the management of .ml domains to a third party on a ten-year contract, and the contract is now ending.
So I guess Mali is honouring its contracts, and I doubt the third party provided anyone with contracts going beyond the ten year period they could guarantee for. I doubt the third party provided contracts at all to be honest.
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Makes me wonder what's going to happen to lemmy.ml if the Mali government is taking back their domains.
All of my posts on other instances are gone now :/
I hope FMHY comes back. Didn't realise how much I liked it until it was gone.
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