The fact that people were registering .ml domains for projects like this is mindboggling. There are many TLDs to pick from without infringing on the terms of use of a country-specific one.
this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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My thoughts exactly. You should not be choosing TLDs that are volatile to upsets like this. Stick with the tried and true .com or .net, or one of the new TLDs that are not bound to a nation or particular type of organization.
Or if you absolutely have to, choose the TLD of a country you live in.
That works, too. I'm on lemmy.ca. Buying a .ca domain requires confirmation of citizenship or other qualification before you can even use it.
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Agreed. I went with lemmy.ca since I'm Canadian and the instance is in my country.
I also heard Lemmy should perform a little quicker for me too this way.
No, practically speaking the domain name should have no effect on access time. DNS has so many layers of caching that as long as SOMEONE has accessed the website nearby (including you), the domain lookup will be local and therefore fast.
Anyway, DNS lookup times, even slow ones, are still not going to be noticable to the end use originally.
No, I meant the instance itself. The server. The one who runs lemmy.ca is here in Canada with me.
It's like when playing a game; You choose servers closet to you for the lowest ping time.
The other reason I neglected to mention was I like to support local. 😎
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Even gTLDs aren't entirely safe. .dev is iffy right now because only Google can give those out and Google domains is going away.
Google domains is going away
What the hell, how am I just hearing about this now?
They didn't even tell domain holders.
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.dev was stupid from the beginning due to how many local domains like that...
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Dang I hope lemm.ee is safe. Hopefully Estonia doesn’t decide the same.
Well, I'm an Estonian citizen at least 😅
I didn't even consider .ee to be a country domain. I thought you used it for the catchy name.
That's pretty cool.
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It'll be fun when Tuvalu decides to take back .tv
1/12th of their national income is from .tv so they'll have sunk before that happens...
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I believe they sold the rights to some US company who is now managing the tld.
They specifically decided to profit off the fact that's it's an attractive tld, unlike tld like .ly and .ml where the country never intended for their tld to get a wide use.
Is there information about this situation with Mali government about ml domains? I cannot find anything about it.
Though apparently some ml domain receives a lot of accidental US military emails :).
Basically Mali took management of it back off Frenom.
Thanks! Found one article from Tuesday about it: https://domainincite.com/28897-freenom-is-losing-another-cctld-after-collecting-military-emails
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Well, this is just weird. When I was migrating from Reddit to this fediverse world I chose .ml and thought it was short for "machine learning" which seemed as a cool domain for me at the time.
FYI, two letter TLDs are country/region/jurisdiction specific. There's an ISO standard for that.
.tvTuvalu.meMontenegro.fm(Federation of) Micronesia
Some countries append additional modifiers to classify their uses:
.ukUnited Kingdom.co.ukCompany- ...
Three or more are generic (traditional or new)
.com,.net,.org, ...
In some cases, Uncle Sam said "first!" and it stuck.
.eduEducation (MURICA).milMilitary (MURRICA).govGovernment (MURRRICA)
Just like what happens with Mali, what some silicon valley hipsters decide as a 'fun' acronym is just that, a fun thought. If the corresponding government decides to take away a specific domain, they probably can.
.mil Military (MURRICA)
That is what made this whole .ml problem. Some people have apparently accidentally leaked American state secrets to Mali by typo.
That's a poor excuse. If something is secret or higher it has a different TLD. The SIPRnet uses .smil for example. There are also tools at the boundaries that don't allow going from SIPR to NIPR unless they meet specific criteria. Basically you can only leak those secrets accidentally if they were already on a system they shouldn't have been on.
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.eduEducation (MURICA)
.edu is not only american. For example I know many schools in France have .edu domains and emails, and I believe it's the case in many more countries.
In 2001 it was limited to US educational institutions only, all registrations prior were grandfathered in.
Although I haven't got a clue why my non-US university, founded in 2009, has a .edu domain.
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No, it's Mali.
The rumour is that lemmy devs chose it to mean "marxist leninist" but I think it's more likely they wanted a free domain name.
The rumor is fake, the devs have said it multiple times. If they would have wanted to do some funny Marxism meme they would have used .su
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Sounds like it will if Mali decides to take back .ml as Gabon apparently did for .ga. background here https://domainincite.com/28814-millions-of-domains-to-be-deleted-as-freenom-loses-its-first-tld
$ whois lemmy.ml
WHOIS lookup for LEMMY.ML can temporarily not be answered. Please try again.
ERROR: domain not found:
$
But it's still in my DNS cache
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Thanks for the image, I didn't know FMHY had an official response, good to know they had backups....unlike me who lives in eternal danger.
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On the technical topic of renaming a domain of a Lemmy server... I think it is worth experimenting with the code. At minimum, I think it should be an option to try and keep the same login/passwords for users from the old install of Lemmy. But even that could prove tricky if a particular domain changed underllying ownership more than once - and user@domain became rewritten by an entirely different person. I guess in the real-world people do often get mail for previous residence of a house.
My biggest concern is legality because Lemmy claims to support privacy. I honestly think it's a bad idea to claim privacy because you run into so many problems. If the user never knows that their lemmy instance changed names and can't find it again, etc. Especially on technical topics, 15+ years of having Reddit keep messages from deleted user accounts offered a lot of great search engine hits. With Lemmy, a person moving to a different instance and deleting their account, so much content is going to get black-hole in favor of 50 instances having copies of a meme post or trivial website link - and solid original content (often in comment discussions) gets removed.
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Certified Lemmy Moment
*affect.
thanks for the humorous takes, but what's the verdict...? and what's the next step, download posts and settings and move elsewhere?
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