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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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.
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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)
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.
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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!
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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.
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I’ve been seeing posts from users on lemmy.ml though? How’s that possible
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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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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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.
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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 :/
Now that we see things like this can happen, maybe we can make it easier to resolve going forward.
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