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Is there information about this situation with Mali government about ml domains? I cannot find anything about it.
Though apparently some
mldomain receives a lot of accidental US military emails :).Well, this is just weird. When I was migrating from Reddit to this fediverse world I chose .ml and thought it was short for “machine learning” which seemed as a cool domain for me at the time.
No, it’s Mali.
The rumour is that lemmy devs chose it to mean “marxist leninist” but I think it’s more likely they wanted a free domain name.
The rumor is fake, the devs have said it multiple times. If they would have wanted to do some funny Marxism meme they would have used .su
Maybe they didn’t choose it for that, but to be fair they are definitely and admittedly Marxist-Leninists
Yeah they are, so if they did choose .ml for that reason they would have no problem admitting it also. So it’s pretty clear that they just wanted a free domain.
$ whois lemmy.ml WHOIS lookup for LEMMY.ML can temporarily not be answered. Please try again. ERROR: domain not found: $But it’s still in my DNS cache
Yep, I have the same result from whois
On the technical topic of renaming a domain of a Lemmy server… I think it is worth experimenting with the code. At minimum, I think it should be an option to try and keep the same login/passwords for users from the old install of Lemmy. But even that could prove tricky if a particular domain changed underllying ownership more than once - and user@domain became rewritten by an entirely different person. I guess in the real-world people do often get mail for previous residence of a house.
My biggest concern is legality because Lemmy claims to support privacy. I honestly think it’s a bad idea to claim privacy because you run into so many problems. If the user never knows that their lemmy instance changed names and can’t find it again, etc. Especially on technical topics, 15+ years of having Reddit keep messages from deleted user accounts offered a lot of great search engine hits. With Lemmy, a person moving to a different instance and deleting their account, so much content is going to get black-hole in favor of 50 instances having copies of a meme post or trivial website link - and solid original content (often in comment discussions) gets removed.
Thanks for the image, I didn’t know FMHY had an official response, good to know they had backups…unlike me who lives in eternal danger.
I’m confused why backups would even matter. Are the servers physically hosted in Mali and the government seized them?
Because if the government just invalidated the domain, that’s completely different. In that case a server device with everything on it still exists in the same place it always did, it’s just DNS that has changed.
(And yes, I understand that losing the domain name and the certs attached to it would be a big deal, but there’s no data loss, hence no need to pull from backups.)
Well, to begin with we didn’t even know what the heck happened, so being aware that our data is safe is one big relief.
I don’t remember the name of another growing instance that just disappeared (different issue I guess) I don’t recall that their users ever got their data back again.
*affect.
thanks for the humorous takes, but what’s the verdict…? and what’s the next step, download posts and settings and move elsewhere?
The fact that people were registering .ml domains for projects like this is mindboggling. There are many TLDs to pick from without infringing on the terms of use of a country-specific one.
My thoughts exactly. You should not be choosing TLDs that are volatile to upsets like this. Stick with the tried and true .com or .net, or one of the new TLDs that are not bound to a nation (unless you can comply with the stipulations) or particular type of organization.
Do people not remember back in the 2010s when bit.ly was the main link shortener used everywhere on the internet, and then Ghadafi, the then dictator of Libya, declared the site to be incompatible with Muslin decency norms because it was used for porn? And then all bit.ly links were just dead links?
How many times do we have to learn this lesson? Domain name hacks are fun but just not worth it. And in 2023, now we have all the new TLDs. This was a dumb decision
