This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
If i remember right it was also "free to register but insanely expensive to renew once they start to see traffic"
Renewal costs are my primary consideration when picking domains. Subscription fees is how your money disappears when you're not looking.
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?
Why are so many instances using .ml anyway?
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.
It can also definitely stand for Machine Learning which is the first thing that comes to my mind
Yes but lemmy has nothing to do with Machine Learning.
I think it's because ML is a popular shorthand for 'Marxist-Leninist' since they mostly seem to be communist servers
It was free
I know a ton about DNS and its technical functionality, not necessarily the regulations guiding registrars, but the technician in me says your TTL (how long other servers wait until asking where xyz.ml points to) hasn’t expired, maybe? Perhaps the government administration process simply hasn’t executed any action against those particular registrars yet?
I never liked TLDs that are from random islands or less than stable countries and there are so many great TLDs available now, I simply don’t see the reason to use such obscure TLDs just for the marketing factor.
Using .ml was stupid in the first place. No need to try to be a special snowflake by using a sketchy TLD.
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.
Man, hacking, DDOS and now this. The fediverse just can't catch a break...
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.
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.
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.
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)
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 ...
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.
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)
Visited lemmy.ml : it is on.
When was it down ?
I just visited lemmy.ml as well and still up, however cannot get to lemmy.fmhy.ml in any app or browser.
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.
Why is Meta suing Freenom?
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.
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
A lot of people should be concerned about this for .me domains as well (Montenegro)
Personally I think more people should be aware of the evil company that is Freenom. (Not saying Meta is not evil.)
Or at least the people that unwittingly transact with them and give them attention / money.
Why was .ml selected to begin with?
.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.
The domain bs is a interesting case of scummy practices in general, .tv was missused in a similar way with awful contracts, essentially scamming a already increadably poor country!
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.
FYI 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.
