lemmy.fmhy.ml is gone [update from the team]

Man this is all so interesting to see so many unique situations testing the Fediverse to see how it holds up.

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.)

Lemmy has had such a crazy month and a half. Insane growth, XSS injections, DDOS attacks, admin takeover, domain name seizures. What a wild ride

Posting here for visibility as I guess most people on Lemmy are not on Firefish/Mastodon

glad to see them not go down the vlemmy path

First I join Vlemmy.net and then FMHY.ML... I am afraid whatever instance I join next will collapse 😭

I’ve been seeing posts from users on lemmy.ml though? How’s that possible

Frick, my website uses .ml and it's gone.

What about lemmy.ml? Can govt just take their domain?

Re-federation is probably possible. BUT! You're going to always have problems with older content. Case in point my federation error messages is at 2300. About half are failed requests on fmhy.ml.

So for re-federation what's needed:

1: Remote instances should unsubscribe all users from any fmhy groups. They're dead now. They can only announce that and hope they do. I reckon when their errors start ramping up (as I saw yesterday) they will be looking into why. Probably to help de-federate from the old URL
2: The fmhy instance should unsubscribe all users from all remote groups but keep a note of the groups while identifying as fmhy.ml. Then once on a configuration for the new domain re-subscribe to each one. The first step should hopefully stop them trying (and failing) to federate new events to the old URL. The second step should trigger federation with the new one.
3: They could be able to keep the DB. But I am not sure in what places the old domain might be stored in the DB and what would need fixing there. Also not sure if they'd need to regenerate keys. Not sure if they'll see the key was attached to the old domain and refuse to talk to the instance.

Now what's going to be a problem? Well ALL the existing content out there has references to users on the old domain. It's VERY hard to fix that. Like every instance would need to fix their database. Not worth it. But, whenever someone likes/unlikes or comments or whatever a post made from fmhy.ml then there's a good chance a remote instance will queue up a retrieval of:

1: User info about the poster/commentor/liker
2: Missing comments/posts for a like/comment event

And those will fail and error log. I don't think there's a way around that aside from editing the whole database on every instance. Again, IMO not worth it.

Would be a nice federation feature if, provided you could identify with the correct private key, announce a domain change which would automatically trigger the above in federated instances, or at the very least some kind of internal redirect for outgoing messages.

I posted this on another thread about this, but I'll repost it here:

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.

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.

FYI discussion on lemmy.ml about it

https://lemmy.ml/post/2286939

Makes me wonder what's going to happen to lemmy.ml if the Mali government is taking back their domains.

All of my posts on other instances are gone now :/

I hope FMHY comes back. Didn't realise how much I liked it until it was gone.

Now that we see things like this can happen, maybe we can make it easier to resolve going forward.

Prolly a noob question but why was the .ml TLD chosen in the first place?

Does this have anything to do with the whole email thing from the American military? According to the financial times, there are about 117.000 emails send to .ML addresses instead of .MIL..

Translated page: https://tweakers-net.translate.goog/nieuws/211828/nederlander-die-ml-voor-mali-beheert-kreeg-duizenden-e-mails-amerikaanse-leger.html?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp

So why is lemmy.ml still working?

At least I see posts from their instance, like this one https://midwest.social/post/1290001

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.

But they only took the domain name, not the server? So it should be no issue to just get another domain, change a bit of config on the system and web server, and be up and running in no time?

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?

I migrated, but I would happily rejoin under a different tld.

Thanks for that, was concerned about keeping my subscription to that community. Keep us posted and let us know where you end up so I can change over my community subscription.

Anyway I think the lesson learned here is don't use free TLDs. Lemmy is not at all designed to deal with domain name changes.

Is there some news coverage on the mali governments actions? I couldn't find anything on my quick google search

This is why we host our instance on a .org. Honestly another huge blow for Lemmy. It doesn't really inspire confidence in the platform. Hopefully after enough time passes smaller instances like us and the bigger ones left will have help up a good track record to inspire confidence again.

It was good while it lasted and they managed to keep it going longer than my first instance (two days)

Not all instances are created equal however one I tried to sign upto their email verification didn't work and others just didn't bother to activate my account for whatever the reason.

If this was a planned takeover by the government, why was there no notification sent in time? Why is lemmy.ml not shut down in parallel?

Good timing for Reddit …. Wait….

I’m happy with the app because I would get suspicious every time the link changes again… pffff

I initially started on Lemmy.ml but decided to look for smaller instances. Not only just to be safe for stuff like this, but also to find a tighter community. I found an instance dedicated to the area I grew up around and have been really happy with that move.

What happens when it goes down, will all of the posts be gone?

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.