this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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[–] [email protected] 176 points 1 year ago (1 children)

the argument for .ml domain has always been absurd to begin with. So it's free but the price you pay is that it's being run by Mali. I'd just drop 8$/year tbh, that's not a hill you want to die for. Also you harm your project by being SEO punished for using spam-associated TLDs like this. One of the reasons original Lemmy took so long to adopt until Reddit's API drama. Pretty dumb ngl.

[–] [email protected] 60 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If i remember right it was also "free to register but insanely expensive to renew once they start to see traffic"

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Renewal costs are my primary consideration when picking domains. Subscription fees is how your money disappears when you're not looking.

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[–] [email protected] 142 points 1 year ago (3 children)

This brings a disturbing thought to mind.. if an instance domain name like foo.bar lapses and someone else snaps the domain up (or of it gets stolen) can the new controller plop Lemmy on a server and be instantly federated? If so what kind of damage could they do?

[–] [email protected] 177 points 1 year ago (8 children)

No, the signatures wouldn't match.

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[–] [email protected] 63 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is why you don't let your domain registration lapse. It's not the only way computers on the internet verify each other's identity, but a hell of a lot of internet security features are based around domain names, so keeping yours functioning is a very big deal.

[–] [email protected] 66 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Domain registration ≠ internet security. Root of trust is in cryptographic keys, not domains. DNS is not the security cornerstone you make it out to be. PKI says hi!

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (5 children)

ICANN has an Expired Registration Recovery Policy (ERRP) that requires your registrar to give your domain a 30-day grace period before deleting the records. ERRP also requires them to shutdown your DNS resolutions 8 days before deletion.

You’d have to be really mismanaging your domain if you miss all the required email reminders and don’t notice your domain has been non functional for a couple of days.

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[–] [email protected] 104 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (11 children)

Out of curiosity, other than fmhy.ml, lemmy.ml, and lemmygrad.ml, what other Lemmy instances were using .ml domains? Also, how are the latter two still running but fmhy.ml isn't?

edit: This has triggered a chain of comments I wasn't expecting. I'd appreciate it if someone can answer on a technical level. Is the latter two using a different registrar or name server which is why it still works for them?

[–] [email protected] 83 points 1 year ago (10 children)

Why are so many instances using .ml anyway?

[–] [email protected] 145 points 1 year ago (31 children)

AFAIK, lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml use it because the ml can also stand for "Marxist-Leninist", and the two primary maintainers of Lemmy are Marxist-Leninists . Not sure about the others though.

[–] [email protected] 65 points 1 year ago (5 children)

It can also definitely stand for Machine Learning which is the first thing that comes to my mind

[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 year ago

Yes but lemmy has nothing to do with Machine Learning.

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[–] [email protected] 49 points 1 year ago (9 children)

I think it's because ML is a popular shorthand for 'Marxist-Leninist' since they mostly seem to be communist servers

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[–] [email protected] 96 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Man, hacking, DDOS and now this. The fediverse just can't catch a break...

[–] [email protected] 76 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Resiliency is the strongpoint.

If Reddit shuts down, all of Reddit dies.

Same with Facebook, YouTube, etc. is that highly unlikely? Well, yeah, but still nonzero. The fediverse offers resiliency in this regard, and no one person has the ability to shut it down. Even if all instances decide to shut down, new instances can still be spun up.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago (11 children)

If the communities you like to read and post to are down, then Fediverse is effectively down for you. Thus it doesn't offer any additional resilience, it's not a P2P system.

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (33 children)

Would help if users spread out over all the running servers because problem is just a few lemmy servers have all the users. For example the instance I run would be a simple proxy to use for all the content and then would mitigate issues when a big server had problems since just parts of the fediverse would be affected from the users pov.

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[–] [email protected] 95 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Using .ml was stupid in the first place. No need to try to be a special snowflake by using a sketchy TLD.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It's one of the 5 TLD (now 4 I guess) that are free. The others being .tk, .ga, .cf and .gq

We need free TLDs.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (2 children)

But- But- But the memes of a Marxist-Leninist instance!!1!

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[–] [email protected] 85 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (41 children)

Hi, professional DNS engineer here! if anyone has any questions about the inner workings of DNS or top level domains, ask away! (THIS IS MY MOMENT)

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[–] [email protected] 73 points 1 year ago (5 children)

lemmygrad.ml and lemmy.ml are gone? So sad.

Anyway.

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[–] [email protected] 71 points 1 year ago (30 children)

Link to the actual post OP screenshotted: https://very.bignutty.xyz/notes/9hf13it1ced3b2za

Screenshots of text are not the way. The crappy “hey, a text thing I want to share, let me take an accessibility-poisoning screenshot and upload that graphic file like a psychopath instead of just copy/pasting either the link to the text or the text itself like a decent human being” routine needs to die with Reddit, we have to be better than that here.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Screenshots of text preserve the state of the text at the time it was seen...

Yes, it's not good for accessibility but it's a good way to quickly capture a moment in time.

(I would recommend perhaps also copy/pasting a synopsis for people who might be vision impaired etc)

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[–] [email protected] 68 points 1 year ago (19 children)

It's called a single-point of failure in Engineering.

Funny enough it wasn't even a technical one but a contractual one.

Maybe there is some kind of lesson here on the risk of delegating critical structural elements to 3rd parties that rent rather than own that which they're selling ...

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[–] [email protected] 58 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Visited lemmy.ml : it is on.
When was it down ?

[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 year ago

I just visited lemmy.ml as well and still up, however cannot get to lemmy.fmhy.ml in any app or browser.

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[–] [email protected] 54 points 1 year ago

It was quite hard to find any information on this, so I will post what I found.

https://domainincite.com/tag/freenom

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/05/26/2121222/phishing-domains-tanked-after-meta-sued-freenom

That second link is less relevant but interesting.

[–] Mikina 45 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Why is Meta suing Freenom?

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Why is Meta suing Freenom?

[–] [email protected] 53 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Freenom gives away domains, many of which are used by phishers and other bad actors. Meta is suing them for not being responsive to their complaints about this. And I guess the injury inflicted on their users by phishers.

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago (3 children)

A lot of people should be concerned about this for .me domains as well (Montenegro)

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I was using .ml domains for my selfhosted services, since it was just an hobby and I didn't wanted to invest money on it. Apart from Freenom website being pretty unusable since I have memory, I've already had troubles renewing them last year and now they stopped working without any notice nor update from Freenom itself. Finally I decided to move to a payed domain from Infomaniak, since it's been more than a year I've been selfhosting and $10/year is a fair price for me.

But still without those free domains I wouldn't probably ever started selfhosting, and I guess a lot of other people like me wouldn't have experimented or spin up their projects if they had to pay for a domain from the beginning. So despite my hate for Freenom I guess I have to thank them and hope someone else (maybe a bit more "professional") will take its place in the future

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Why was .ml selected to begin with?

[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

.ml stands for Marxist/Leninist apparently. Communists try not to let idealism get in the way of practicality challenge(impossible)

To be fair this is a pretty crazy black swan event they couldn’t have possibly seen coming. But yeah, this is why novelty domain suffixes are novelties.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I can understand why refederation needs to be done manually, but I'm confused as to why transferring users and histories is a maybe. Web and database hosting are mutually exclusive from domain hosting/registration.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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