An update:
- fmhy.ml is gone, due to the ongoing fiasco with mali government taking all their .ml domains back
- As such, lemmy.fmhy.ml is also gone, we are currently exploring ways to refederate (or somehow restart federation entirely) without breaking anything substantial
- We have backups, so don’t worry about data loss (you can view them on other instances anyway)
Currently, we have fmhy.net and are exploring options to somehow migrate, thank you for your patience.
I hope FMHY comes back. Didn’t realise how much I liked it until it was gone.
Posting here for visibility as I guess most people on Lemmy are not on Firefish/Mastodon
All of my posts on other instances are gone now :/
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
It’s just the domain, though. That’s not a big deal to change.
Federation connections are by domain name, so … it is a big deal
From that point of view, yes. That’d mess things up, you’re right. But from my understanding, they won’t lose any data, accounts will remain, as well as subscriptions that lemmy.ml users have. Or am I wrong?
The problem is, if they don’t have access to their original
.mldomain, their accounts are still tied to it. That means if they try to interact, such as subscribing to a community, when the data for that action tries to be sent back (such as updates) it’ll go to the.mldomain, which they wouldn’t receive.Lemmy doesn’t have a built in way to just change the domain name, or really any of the ActivityPub services AFAIK. You’d have to either really do some hacky stuff to get around it (which could result in unknown issues down the line) or reset everything.
Oh, it’s more complex than I expected. Thanks for explaining. I was wrong.
Most of the hacky ways around it involve retaining ownership of the old domain and leaving it up indefinitely as a pointer to the new location. If your domain is taken from you though there is not much you can do.
Seriously dumb to have used this TLD considering there are a ton of choices these days.
deploying the fediverse instances-instance communication on top of a mesh-net like yggdrasil, using their addresses as domain names, may be a quick fix without having to change the paradigm
Right. This will basically make nearly every /c live in .world as all of the .ml /c’s go defunct. That, or Beehaw, which is walled off from everyone else.
(Side note… my work’s firewalls block everything *.ml – and that’s the only thing that saved me from creating my account there)
The instance is known by its domain name in the federation network. If that domain name changes, it’s like starting a new instance from scratch.
Sounds like a complicated project to migrate communities and posts and users to a new instance without breaking something.
Think about all the links to lemmy.ml
Currently, activitypub identity is tied to domain name. Mastodon support migration as long as the old domain is still up during the migration process, but AFAIK Lemmy doesn’t even have a process to migrate an instance to a new domain yet.
Someone should tell Lemmy devs and send them a crate of coffee because it’ll be a race to implement domain migration before all .ml domains got shut down.
lemmy.ml is still up as of right now. Possibly they contracted a subscription to the domain name to keep it up. They had to do something to retain it otherwise the site would be unreachable. If lemmy.ml does have to change names it will be a hassle since I’ve got a good number of community subscriptions there.
This wouldn’t happen to an instance with a regularly subscribed domain name. Problem is the .ml domains were free and the associated country decided to claim them back. The risk of using a free top level domain is something that should have been considered. I don’t think it’s worth the risk versus the cost savings considering how difficult it is to migrate a Lemmy instance.
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.
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.
I was frustrated with the outage yesterday and created a new account on a different instance so I could still browse. Couple hours later I had all my subscriptions filled out and the experience is almost identical to my first account.
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!
I’m now wondering what happens if the Mali government (or someone else) begins using those domains with their own lemmy instance, potentially with malicious content.
Would the instances they’ve federated with begin ingesting and serving that content automatically? Or would that be blocked due to key mismatch?
I think they need the private key for the https certificate to do that
Afaik it is all connected to the domain name, so they could definitely start to impersonate any .ml instance. Other instances could detect that the signing key for federation messages changed, but that’s about it. Their admins would probably have to block/defederate them manually.
Shall I make an account in another instance?
I’ve migrated from fmhy to feddit.uk, luckily my subscriptions were on a cached web page soon was able to manually re-subscribe.
Nope. Domains don’t store data. They can change domain and keep all the data.
Unfortunately, no.
Currently, activitypub identity is tied to domain name. While mastodon support migration as long as the old domain is still up during the migration process, AFAIK Lemmy doesn’t even have a process to migrate an instance to a new domain yet.
So basically, if you switch your instance domain, you’ll mess up all your federation network, unless Lemmy devs implement a solution soon.
Calckey.social will be transferring all data to new firefish.social, first in the Fediverse.
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.
Yeah, they are actively working on functionality to migrate user accounts and other data between instances, so that they can use that functionality to migrate everything on an instance to another instance.
Since migrating data affects all the replicated data on other instances as well, I guess when they migrate lemmy.ml somewhere else, all of Lemmy will be down for a day or two, being just overloaded with all the migration stuff.
Thanks for the info.
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.
This says that they block outgoing mail to .ml domains from its network.
https://domainincite.com/28897-freenom-is-losing-another-cctld-after-collecting-military-emails
Edit: wrong link
For most situations, there is a global address list that members can use. There are instances where emails need to be sent outside of the .mil domain though, such as to other government agencies that use a .gov, or to contractors on commercial domains, as well as to partner nations that will be on their own countries’ domains.
Internally they do block that but the problem are people outside the network sending something to a .mil address and mistyping.
So why is lemmy.ml still working?
At least I see posts from their instance, like this one https://midwest.social/post/1290001
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???
I doubt they care about such things.
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.
Man this is all so interesting to see so many unique situations testing the Fediverse to see how it holds up.
IMO the real takeaway is that a big instance disappeared overnight and yet here we all are on the fediverse talking about it.
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
This is precisely why my experiments with servers and internet technology stop whenever a dns is mentioned.
If i need to pay a subscription or otherwise rely on a centralized entity its not independent hosting and my interest in it disappears instantly.
you rely on centralised entities every day to use the internet… ICANN, IANA, and a few more right at the top, government agencies to manage IP ranges etc, whoever owns your IP block, whoever provides your network… TBH you rely on cloudflare even if you never pay them because they CDN half the damn internet. you reply on google and amazon simply because again they host services you use
don’t kid yourself, the internet works because of centralised bodies; not despite them! DNS is the least of your concern; at least those names are commoditised and have enough scrutiny (unless you choose a TLD that doesn’t have favourable TOS) BY those centralised authorities that they’re pretty untouchable short of legal challenges
I know, i specified “internet technology” for this reason.
I run a few websites and servers all of them are local only. Society can go to hell, my stuff isn’t relying on it.
I also use the internet of course but thats outside of my creative ventures.
I’m kind of curious about how you think the internet works.
It works very different from how i would want it to work for sure. I specified internet technology for a reason though. The creative limit i put on myself is that all systems should remain fully independent with the exception of hardware requirements. Everything remains local for now.
That’s a pretty specific requirement but luckily you can host your own VPN and access it on your device and then access the service you’re hosting via a local address. So if you do run into this again know that there is a way to circumvent the need to rely on *checks notes* DNS.
Or don’t rely on a country code tld thats being used for vanity purposes.
Eh, you can self host your name system though. OpenNIC does exactly that. The problem is convincing other people to use your resolver instead of using ICANN.
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.
Because this caught everyone by surprise or was there some indication that things would just continue business as usual? The registrar has known the contract ended since it was signed 10 years ago, I would figure this would have been accounted for.
IDK, but registrars are generally shitty and exploitative. I’d be surprised if they volunteered that info
I’m happy with the app because I would get suspicious every time the link changes again… pffff
Makes me wonder what’s going to happen to lemmy.ml if the Mali government is taking back their domains.
Frick, my website uses .ml and it’s gone.
Lost mine too, had an .ml domain for testing servers. Was baffled why the DNS won’t resolve, then I see this.
Are you using the free domain deal, or are you paying for your .ml domain? I suspect they only revoking those unpaid .ml domains.
Freebie. I actually bought a new domain this time.
You might still buy your old .ml domain once Mali government open up registration again, assuming domain squatters doesn’t grab it first.
I only used that domain because it’s free. Now I’m buying an actual domain, I’m not going back to that one.
Crap, sorry to hear that
Now that we see things like this can happen, maybe we can make it easier to resolve going forward.
Hello! I’m new to Lemmy, could someone break this down like I’m 5 and explain what it means for the people who were already on there?
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.
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.
Freenom (the third party in question) has been pretty shady for years. I got burned with their free .tk names a few times back in the day.
