this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Lemmy

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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to [email protected].

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Porkbun LLC is a DNS registrar, so maybe somebody didn't pay their bill?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well, not being owned by a profit-driven evil stab-us-in-the-back company going IPO has advantages and disadvantages :-(

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

How bad could the bill have been? Was there any prior mention of server costs/donations before this?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I don't think it is a payment issue. At least in Brazil (where I live), a registration (which can be done directly with the .br registrar, not necessarily third parties) costs less than 10 USD a year.

vlemmy.net was registered less than 2 months ago, for 5 years. I suppose (hope) it was already paid for 5 years.

it's strange that it's parked at a dynamic dns service though

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I know I’ve forgotten to turn on auto-renew on a domain before. It sucks and caused a lapse. I think most registrars have a cooldown period where you can pay a fee to get your domain back before they release it back into the general pool. It’s usually like 90 days or something.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yeah, I just thought perhaps it was part of a packaged deal or something. You can get a dot com for about that much. I can't imagine .net is much more.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

How odd. Could it be an account hack? Server malfunction?

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

The server isn't malfunctioning. Rather, the name vlemmy.net isn't given you the IP address of the server anymore. Does anyone have the IP? We could test if the server is still there.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Could be a dns server malfunctioning (or rather misconfiguration).

After all, "it's always DNS"

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

"It's not DNS. There's no way it's DNS. It was DNS." My favorite haiku ever

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I checked historical data for the A record and came up with this, no clue if this is the original server address

Ran a ping on it and it timed out so I am guessing u/pyarra just pointed the dns to the park page while they figure out what's going on with this server

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

I also found that record, but I have no way of knowing how accurate it is. I can confirm that it isn't responding. We might have to wait and see if/when it returns.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Really weird.

dynu.com is a dynamic dns service. I don't think the maintainer of vlemmy.net would be running the instance from a dhcp (variable) IP, to justify using dynamic dns.

Or is it usual for people to run instances from their homes using common ISP subscriber variable IP addresses?

Even more strange that it was registered just last month, according to whois. Is vlemmy.net that new?

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

Or is it usual for people to run instances from their homes using common ISP subscriber variable IP addresses?

No. That that would be absolutely ridiculous for anything beyond an ephemeral CounterStrike server.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I found some posts from the creator around the beginning of June letting people know they had just set it up, so it does seem to be fairly new.

https://lemmy.eus/comment/111442

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Aren't many of these instances a product of the reddit migration? I don't expect the one I'm on to be much older.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

That makes sense. I'm a reddit refugee, just recently joined. Should have checked the domain registration date. I suppose there will be a lot of new instances dying or not being properly maintened in the near future.

Edit: when I couldn't access vlemmy.net, I signed up to feddit.nl. Just checked the domain registration date; June 1st 2023. Bummer.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Do they have an Open Collective page or something similar? Transparency about servers and costs? Those are the first things to look for in an instance.

Also, for all we know vlemmy could return. We have no details yet.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

If you’re self hosting at home yes dyn dns is far cheaper, and from a users perspective there’s no difference

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)