Submitted 1 year ago by renwillis@mstdn.social to fediverse@lemmy.world
Another win for the decentralized Fediverse when a government domain takeback can’t shut it down!
Mali has decided to take back .ml from people who took advantage of the free domain like fmhy.ml & maybe lemmy.ml - https://lemmy.world/post/1915581
And while it sucks for those servers & those users may have to migrate, the #Fediverse and it’s plethora of platforms continues on. 💪 💜
@fediverse #lemmy #mastodon #calckey #mali #decentralization
A domain takedown was never able to shut a server down, not even with centralized servers. Most big services are accessible via multiple domains of different countries, and this would just disable one of them. But for the Fediverse that means that they also “disabled” an entire instance with all its users.
This actually shows us that relying on domains can be a problem for the Fediverse! Imo we need to upgrade the federation protocol to be able to handle these things, like propagating a domain change or migrating accounts to other instances.
I’ve been wandering why everyone has a domain on their instance, even if it’s a single-user personal thingy.
Because you need a way to be reachable over HTTPS for other instances to be able to securely send you updates (new posts/comments/votes etc.), so you need a trusted certificate. While HTTPS does not strictly require a domain name^1^ it vastly simplifies the process.
^1^: It’s possible to get a trusted certificate for an IP address, but not nearly as easy as getting one for a domain. And it’s probably also more expensive than just getting a domain and using Let’s Encrypt to get a certificate.
We should require all servers to have opennic DNS and opennic TLS certificates installed
@renwillis I'm not so sure this is a "win", since the Fediverse wasn't specifically targeted by any entity involved to begin with. If anything, it's just a straight-up loss to the communities that have to reassemble themselves under a new domain again, many of whom were probably mostly new users to the Fediverse to begin with, and are likely to be turned off by this experience. If anything, this just exposes that the Fediverse is significantly sustained by flimsy, free/cheap platforms that are vulnerable to disappearing without any notice. That doesn't exactly instill faith.
It's a really bad look, to be perfectly honest.
@Chozo @fediverse disagree. It's another argument for decentralization that 1 entity taking down another entity doesn't take down the whole system.
If the US seized Reddit.com today, the whole site would just be gone. Poof!
The US could seize 1000 servers today and yet the Fediverse would continue on.
i don’t think you understand how domains work.
If lemmy.world went down, so would most of Lemmy, so this is already a huge problem.
@renwillis The Fediverse is more than just the collective network. It's also the individual communities, some of which no longer exist right now. Those communities are now scrambling to figure out what to do.
Yes, the whole of the Fediverse is just fine. But the overall health of the Fediverse relies heavily on the health of individual communities.
I could also get hot by lightning there times a day but I don’t optimize for it. This is a lol and definitely points back to how shitty personal servers may be. I for one hope a .org starts a monitizartion scheme, deals with the privacy issues this community blatantly ignores, and hires some professionals who actually know what they are doing.
If this is a loss, a loss compared to what? Centralised servers? If Lemmy was a centralised server, this would’ve taken the while site down. As another commenter mentioned, if the US government decides take Reddit down, the whole service would be lost. But in the Fediverse no single government can stop it.
I do kinda agree, this isn’t great for general adoption but it’s a vital learning curve and hopefully smart people in the community will help develop ways to avoid it going forward and tools to fix it when it does happen
We NEED better abilities to migrate accounts to other instances like with Mastodon!
This is one of the problems with using country TLDs. They look cute, but when you buy it, you may not realize who controls it. Lemm.ee is similarly in a precarious position.
I really wish we could all agree to stop using country TLDs for this
You have to be careful with any TLD. People outside the US have found themselves subject to US law because they had a US controlled domain name.
Some ccTLDs are fine, some are not, but you have to think carefully when you buy it.
Who owns or controls .world domains?
I think .ee and .ca are fine. lemmy.ca is for Canadians specifically
For .ca specifically: as long as you are a Canadian individual, or have a sufficient connection to Canada, or a Corp with a trademark registered in Canada then you are qualified to own that domain - but as to who is really checking I have no idea… CIRA complainants maybe?
Is an internet pirate community an internet pirate community without the odd patch off rough seas?
yarr
Just looking at my list of subscribed communities… There are a lot on lemmy.ml.
They’re toast if Mali yoinks the domain name.
This seems really, really bad for Lemmy…
Lemmy as a whole not being hurt even if some domains are gone is the entire point of being decentralized. But yeah, it’s really bad that communities made there will also be gone as it is now.
We need user and community migration like Mastodon does, and quick.
Counterpoint: the generic communities being hosted on Lemmy.ml (an instance with a very strong political identity) simply because it was oldest was a real risk for the growth of Lemmy as a whole and this is a fantastic opportunity to rebuild those core communities on more generic Instances like Lemmy.world.
Eh, it’ll probably just bounce back tbh
Why did so many instances use .ml domains?
'Cos they were free.
lmfao, frickin seriously? you’re gonna build up an instance where the domain is part of all of your users’ identities and you’re not even gonna spend the $10/yr to keep that solid? with how much time goes into running a lemmy instance and not getting overrun by bots, that’s an absolutely ridiculous assignment of resources
Lol one would expect people technical enough to setup a Lemmy instance would be aware of the fall of freenom and the fate of those free domains
Alright, fair enough
Ahh, makes more sense.
Are there any other domains that could be in a similar situation now?
I think a lot of them were tankies who thought it was cool to have ML in their domain name. They had lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml iirc. Honestly I don’t know whether to be happy those communities took a hit or sad that I’ve lost one way of identifying and avoiding auth-left instances.
What’s with this .ml love and Lemmy? Are people really building lemmy instances on those free domains obtained from freenom, unaware of its fall?
I might be unaware of some technical issues here but why not just get another domain, point it at the server, then update the database to change all references to lemmy.ml to thenewdomain.tld and then make an announcement on a couple of the bigger instances? Federation will take care of propagating the news far and wide. Then, as users hear the news they can just login using the same details and those of us subscribed to Communities on .ml can just update our subscriptions.
I mean, it’s not a perfect solution but it’ll work, surely?
ActivityPub uses URLs as IDs for everything. And there’s no way to update those IDs, it’s possible to update inbox URLs and other things but the main address of the object itself is its URL and thus there’s no way to propagate it without essentially making a new one.
It’s not impossible to do, but managing to get that to federate to all instances in a sane way is not currently possible.
There’s a ridiculous amount of URLs in the database and even fixing all of those won’t fully do the job, as post content might still refer to the old URL and whatnot.
It’s a messy situation, you’re not supposed to lose your domain.
the URL is the id in the database
Who was the idiot that decided to use for a database ID an identifier that almost entirely depends on external (and, for fediverse purposes, usually antagonistic) entities?
That seems like an ActivityPub problem, not a problem with the admin who lost the domain. Perhaps somebody should fix dumbass design flaws to the protocol.
Federations won’t survive with obvious flaws like that. It needs resilienacy.
The problem is with the federation. Other instances will try to federate with the old domain and won’t recognize the new domain. AFAIK work is still underway to allow migrating to a new domain and allow other instance to recognize the domain change.
Time to create BGPML… a federation protocol router for .ml like situations. ;)
It’s my understanding that this isn’t possible. Migrating domains in Lemmy is not supported though it is possible with some very hacky solutions like you’re describing. But the old domain needs to be retained indefinitely as a pointer to the domain or it will break federation with other instances. If they lost control of the domain then federation will break. They can potentially migrate users and posts, but it is effectively like resetting and starting over as a new instance.
Right, but if Mali do reclaim all the .ml domains out there then there’s little option? Yes, federation will break for .ml and yes it’ll be like starting over on a fresh instance but only in terms of federation - all the users, communities, posts and comments will still exist, just under a new domain. Once the new domain starts federating people will catch on, especially if the news is posted on the larger instances.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying its not a problem, I’m just not sure its a total disaster either.
So, I really don’t want to say “crypto solves this”, but name identities and ownership over domains is actually one of the valid use cases for NFTs.
Cryptography solved this a long time ago. No need for NFTs or anything “crypto”.
How can you solve Zooko’s Trilemma without “anything crypto”?
What’s going on with/in Mali anyway? When I search, all the results are just about the US military email fuckup.
@WhoRoger yeah, apparently the company managing the domain, their 10 year contract is up and Mali decided not to renew and brought it in house. https://domainincite.com/28897-freenom-is-losing-another-cctld-after-collecting-military-emails
Ok so I guess the old registrar were a bunch of twats, so the gov kicked them out and in the process potentially benefits from the US mil email thing.
All while doing the typical government thing of messing things up for everybody because they don’t know how anything works.
Am I right?
In the internet biz since 1993 here (retired): choose your registrar as carefully as your domain name.
Lowest price is the dumbest reason. It’s never the way to choose anything. ID what your needs are, what satisfies that, then shop for the best price…
Anyway at the moment for my purposes the EU with it’s gdpr and other rules is the best choice for many reasons. I’m using joker.com.
Top level domains (.ml etc) have their own rules, you gotta read them carefully. I don’t know anything about .ml and whether they allowed that usage or not.
This makes little sense. Piracy domains get cracked down regularly and they simply move and mirror. Has nothing to do with the Fediverse.
Oof best of luck to you guys on .ml instances, might be worth looking at buying a domain as a backup to migrate to. Don’t wanna be caught off guard like this especially if they are trying to recoup all their urls. I went with a .boo domain to be unique for my instance but there are loads of TLDs out there
i remember for a period of time it was really easy and completely free to get an .io url. i assume it’s something similar here.
Maybe this will have the knock on effect of some migration tools being developed.
I was on fmhy now I’m on blahaj.zone, but I have to re-find and subscribe to all my communities
FYI I made a little tool for migrating / backing up your Lemmy subscriptions, blocks, profile settings, etc.
Nothing to be done for fmhy now that it’s gone, but for the future, it might help to have a backup.
Thanks, I’ll probably forget to do it once I get things built up again
Big whoop mf! At least they got the data so that guys like you have something to subscribe
Explain yourself.
I didn’t realise you could do that, but then again I have no idea how country specific domains work
@dylanTheDeveloper In hindsight, getting a country domain as your main was not a biggest brain idea.
Quick question and this may have been answered or obvious…
Is it not possible to federate with onion sites via tor or i2p sites?
You can only federate via tor or i2p if both sides support those protocols, because for federation to work between two nodes both nodes need to be able to initiate connections to the other. That means one-way bridges like tor exit nodes are not sufficient.
I’d guess most Fediverse servers don’t support either of those protocols, so any new server trying to federate solely through them would have an extremely limited view of the Fediverse.
Though I suppose theoretically nothing is really preventing a motivated group of server admins from set up a parallel “dark Fediverse” containing only onion sites.
You want another beer?
So is there a place where we can access our lemmy.fmhy.ml accounts right now?
I don’t see how this would be an issue with decentralised media either tbh. Probably a bit more of a headache, but that’s it
Using country domains is never fun nor safe.
freamon@endlesstalk.org 1 year ago
That’s a very positive spin on quite a shitty situation (especially if lemmy.ml goes kaputt)
emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
I mean, the .ml domain belongs to Mali and they have every right to take it back.
freamon@endlesstalk.org 1 year ago
True. It might have been better though if the Lemmy devs hadn’t been such cheapskates and forked over the 10 bucks it takes to get a domain name that isn’t sketchy.
ziggurism@lemmy.world 1 year ago
“Every right”? No. They have the power to do so but that doesn’t make it right. They sold those domains fair and square. Contracts were signed.