Fediverse

Man this is all so interesting to see so many unique situations testing the Fediverse to see how it holds up.

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.)

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

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.

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 😭

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.

What about lemmy.ml? Can govt just take their domain?

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.

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.

FYI discussion on lemmy.ml about it

https://lemmy.ml/post/2286939

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.