this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 74 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It seems to be Mali just wanting their domains back, in which case it's uncertain times for all .ml domains.

[–] [email protected] 57 points 1 year ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 75 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] shrugal 30 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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?

[–] shrugal 6 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I think they need the private key for the https certificate to do that

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Shall I make an account in another instance?

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Thanks for the info.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I've migrated from fmhy to feddit.uk, luckily my subscriptions were on a cached web page soon was able to manually re-subscribe.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Nope. Domains don't store data. They can change domain and keep all the data.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Calckey.social will be transferring all data to new firefish.social, first in the Fediverse.