Technology

Using .ml was stupid in the first place. No need to try to be a special snowflake by using a sketchy TLD.

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.

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.

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.

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 ...

Man, hacking, DDOS and now this. The fediverse just can't catch a break...

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!

.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?

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 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?