Fediverse

Sure, but depending on which timezone they are in, it could be nighttime for them

IDK, but registrars are generally shitty and exploitative. I'd be surprised if they volunteered that info

https://domainincite.com/28897-freenom-is-losing-another-cctld-after-collecting-military-emails

They may not have taken the lemmy.ml domain back yet, but because the different instances are federated, you'll still be able to see contents from an instance that's gone.

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???

Happy to see your on shitjustworks now, it's a solid one

It means anybody who will want to go to site lemmy.fmhy.ml will not load site and would think its down, maybe some will find out on google about it, some are already on multiple instances...

Also all links to lemmy.fmhy.ml are dead/gone now.

Btw the domain *.ml was free as i read, at least they could get some 1-5 USD domain name extension.

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.

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 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.