I understand it as the Mali government is taking back all the domains after a subletting contract runs 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)
sab@kbin.social 1 year ago
It seems to be Mali just wanting their domains back, in which case it's uncertain times for all .ml domains.
001100010010@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
rip lemmy.ml
sab@kbin.social 1 year ago
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@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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, locks out users and cuts it off from federation.
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!
rm_dash_r_star@lemm.ee 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.