Using .ml was stupid in the first place. No need to try to be a special snowflake by using a sketchy TLD.
It's one of the 5 TLD (now 4 I guess) that are free. The others being .tk, .ga, .cf and .gq
We need free TLDs.
I'm aware. Using it for something like this is stupid.
But- But- But the memes of a Marxist-Leninist instance!!1!
I wonder if it was done on purpose after it came out that the Pentagon had typo'd ".ml" instead of '.mil' and exposed a lot of sensitive emails...
Highly doubtful much of anything majorly sensitive got leaked. Firstly even unclassified DoD emails are encrypted by default. Secondly anything classified isn't even on a network that can talk to normal email, it's either 100% point to point encrypted or on an airgapped network. If I hopped on SIPR (DoD Secret-level internet) and emailed a normal email address it simply wouldn't work.
the argument for .ml domain has always been absurd to begin with. So it's free but the price you pay is that it's being run by Mali. I'd just drop 8$/year tbh, that's not a hill you want to die for. Also you harm your project by being SEO punished for using spam-associated TLDs like this. One of the reasons original Lemmy took so long to adopt until Reddit's API drama. Pretty dumb ngl.
If i remember right it was also "free to register but insanely expensive to renew once they start to see traffic"
Renewal costs are my primary consideration when picking domains. Subscription fees is how your money disappears when you're not looking.
Hi, professional DNS engineer here! if anyone has any questions about the inner workings of DNS or top level domains, ask away! (THIS IS MY MOMENT)
lemmygrad.ml and lemmy.ml are gone? So sad.
Anyway.
Unfortunately, it seems the tankies are gonna tank right on (over the bodies of students).
Link to the actual post OP screenshotted: https://very.bignutty.xyz/notes/9hf13it1ced3b2za
Screenshots of text are not the way. The crappy “hey, a text thing I want to share, let me take an accessibility-poisoning screenshot and upload that graphic file like a psychopath instead of just copy/pasting either the link to the text or the text itself like a decent human being” routine needs to die with Reddit, we have to be better than that here.
Screenshots of text preserve the state of the text at the time it was seen...
Yes, it's not good for accessibility but it's a good way to quickly capture a moment in time.
(I would recommend perhaps also copy/pasting a synopsis for people who might be vision impaired etc)
At the least, put the screenshot and the link in the post. We can do both, people.
Screenshots stay with time, I hate it when I arrive a bit later and the link is already dead and I have no idea what it said.
It's called a single-point of failure in Engineering.
Funny enough it wasn't even a technical one but a contractual one.
Maybe there is some kind of lesson here on the risk of delegating critical structural elements to 3rd parties that rent rather than own that which they're selling ...
It’s called a single-point of failure in Engineering.
For that instance, yes. For the whole of Lemmy, no. Everything else keeps on chugging along.
Unfortunately that has always been the nature of TLDs
It’s less sketchy if you pay for a domain through a reputable registrar
Man, hacking, DDOS and now this. The fediverse just can't catch a break...
Would help if users spread out over all the running servers because problem is just a few lemmy servers have all the users. For example the instance I run would be a simple proxy to use for all the content and then would mitigate issues when a big server had problems since just parts of the fediverse would be affected from the users pov.
I feel like communities are the bigger problem here. And not one that's easily solved.
If users from multiple instances come together in communities, those communities are still centralized on a single server. So if something happens to that server, or if your instance defederates with it, the whole community goes with it.
The alternative would be to have tons of duplicate communities spread over many instances, but that's a bad user experience.
FYI 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.
The domain bs is a interesting case of scummy practices in general, .tv was missused in a similar way with awful contracts, essentially scamming a already increadably poor country!
Didn't Tuvalu massively benefit from being assigned a TLD that is popular? I read they were able to build an airport with .tv money
Yea, they managed to get it back at some point but it was under external control with close to no benefit for them for a long time!
.ml was a terrible name anyways. People just kept saying everyone was a tannkie whether or not true. Not the image that's going to help you grow or your ideological goals imo
This brings a disturbing thought to mind.. if an instance domain name like foo.bar lapses and someone else snaps the domain up (or of it gets stolen) can the new controller plop Lemmy on a server and be instantly federated? If so what kind of damage could they do?
No, the signatures wouldn't match.
this is why instances should be abstracted away as underlying infrastructure and the users don't have to think about "instances". accounts and communities are replicated across servers.
This is not the solution! Being able to pick a server to trust your data and content moderation with is a feature, not a bug.
What we do have to do is make this feature more resilient and easier to use. Like adding the ability to easily transfer accounts and communities between instances, or even change the domain name of an entire instance.
This is why I have a .org.
Out of curiosity, other than fmhy.ml, lemmy.ml, and lemmygrad.ml, what other Lemmy instances were using .ml domains? Also, how are the latter two still running but fmhy.ml isn't?
edit: This has triggered a chain of comments I wasn't expecting. I'd appreciate it if someone can answer on a technical level. Is the latter two using a different registrar or name server which is why it still works for them?
The Mali government taking control of the .ml tld probably has something to do with the fact that hundreds of thousands of US military emails have been accidentally sent to Mali by users who type .ml instead of .mil in the address field.
I don't understand why they went with free domains in the first place. Freenom is known for being unreliable.
Why is Meta suing Freenom?
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
