Will this also affect lemmy.ml?

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 (unless you can comply with the stipulations) or particular type of organization.

Dang I hope lemm.ee is safe. Hopefully Estonia doesn’t decide the same.

This is terrible news to me, as an OCaml’eer.

There goes all my potential cool project domains … 😭

Well, and it's not like this should take anyone by surprise, it's been 10 years coming. Unless Mali was telling people not to worry and then did an about face? I haven't seen anything to indicate that.

For anyone that wants to learn more about internet domains, the MKBHD Waveform podcast has an awesome episode about this topic. It’s a super interesting listen where they talk about how the internet works and one of the organizations behind it (ICANN).

ICANN and the 7 Keys to the Internet

Apple Music

Spotify

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.

Quoted for emphasis.

They needed the one that stood for "marxist-leninist" is why, in case you were unaware.

but ML also can stand for Marxist Leninist and im sure has been the the way it was read by most early adopters

1/12th of their national income is from .tv so they'll have sunk before that happens...

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.

Basically Mali took management of it back off Frenom.

FYI, two letter TLDs are country/region/jurisdiction specific. There's an ISO standard for that.

• .tv Tuvalu
• .me Montenegro
• .fm (Federation of) Micronesia

Some countries append additional modifiers to classify their uses:

• .uk United Kingdom
• .co.uk Company
• ...

Three or more are generic (traditional or new)

• .com, .net, .org, ...

In some cases, Uncle Sam said "first!" and it stuck.

• .edu Education (MURICA)
• .mil Military (MURRICA)
• .gov Government (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.

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.

I mean, I knew it was a country top level domain but I was told Dessalines intended the "ml" as an abbreviation for "marxist-leninist"

Yep, I have the same result from whois

I'm confused why backups would even matter. Are the servers physically hosted in Mali and the government seized them?

Because if the government just invalidated the domain, that's completely different. In that case a server device with everything on it still exists in the same place it always did, it's just DNS that has changed.

(And yes, I understand that losing the domain name and the certs attached to it would be a big deal, but there's no data loss, hence no need to pull from backups.)

On the technical topic of renaming a domain of a Lemmy server… I think it is worth experimenting with the code.

This is unfortunately only possible if you still own the original domain. Think about it this way: if you could migrate domains without proving you own the original, then what's stopping a bad actor from migrating any domain they want? Keep in mind that Federated servers rely on DNS to verify who's who -- they don't have a backup system for deciding trustworthiness.

Yes, there's no technical reason Lemmy has to rely on DNS to establish trust (aside from the fact that changing this would require a massive rearchitecting effort), but why shouldn't it? It's possible to switch to a different trust system (i.e.: public/private keypairs), but that doesn't actually change the nature of the problem -- people can still lose control of the private key and blow the whole system up (and, arguably, this is a lot more likely to happen than permanently losing a domain).

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.

So, login credentials aren't actually tied to the domain name at all. A user like example@lemmy.ml is simply known as example to the server internally. The server doesn't particularly care if it lives at lemmy.ml or microsoft.com -- if user example shows up and gives the right password, they're allowed to log in. What I'm trying to say is that -- assuming that the user database isn't destroyed -- login info would probably carry over without any special effort needing to be taken at all.

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.

The identity problem you allude to is not exclusive to this scenario. Let's use lemmy.ml as an example: where did the domain come from? The Mali government. Does this mean that the Mali government owned lemmy.ml before it became associated with the Lemmy project? At the risk of oversimplying: yes, pretty much! Prior to 2019, the government of Mali could have created "fraudulent" Fediverse posts under your username, /u/roundsparrow@lemmy.ml.

With that being said, it's kind of a silly concern. Despite being partially distributed, Lemmy is not a read-only database (i.e.: not a blockchain). There's nothing stopping the current domain owner from more-or-less completely undoing vandalism from a prior domain owner by simply asking the other federated servers to delete that fraudulent content. Keep in mind that the domain is not the server; the original operator keeps all of the original data even if they lose the ability to host that data under the original domain.

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.

This is not a problem unique to Lemmy. If Google forgets to pay for gmail.com, then suddenly a lot of email addresses become untrustworthy. This isn't a privacy issue because your old emails don't leave Google's servers. It is a trust issue, however, since the new owners can now impersonate any gmail.com address and receive any new email that was intended for the original owner.

Not to downplay how catastrophic this scenario would be... but I don't think there's any law on the books which would legally obligate Google to operate gmail.com until the end of time. Nothing lasts forever and eventually gmail.com won't be controlled by Alphabet Inc. anymore -- that's just how time works. Those bothered by this uncertainty can instead choose to host their own mail server (or Lemmy instance) on their own domain -- this won't last forever, either... but at least you're in control now.

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.

Just FYI: Much like Reddit, comments continue to exist even when the author deletes their account. The user must explicitly delete each individual comment before deleting their account if they want it all taken down. EDIT: This is not actually currently the case, though as far as I can tell the stated intent is to prefer anonymizing comments over deleting them when deleting an account (source). I don't really get this complaint in the first place, actually... surely both kinds of content would get lost when a user deletes all of their data, right? There's no button that says "delete all of my stuff, except for the shitposts".