An update:
- fmhy.ml is gone, due to the ongoing fiasco with mali government taking all their .ml domains back
- As such, lemmy.fmhy.ml is also gone, we are currently exploring ways to refederate (or somehow restart federation entirely) without breaking anything substantial
- We have backups, so don’t worry about data loss (you can view them on other instances anyway)
Currently, we have fmhy.net and are exploring options to somehow migrate, thank you for your patience.
Man this is all so interesting to see so many unique situations testing the Fediverse to see how it holds up.
let’s hope they’re interesting because it’s novel and the problems were there with other solutions just solved ages ago rather than the alternative: “so many unique situations” because there are a litany of “oops didn’t think of that” moments that will continue to crop up
IMO the real takeaway is that a big instance disappeared overnight and yet here we all are on the fediverse talking about it.
Posting here for visibility as I guess most people on Lemmy are not on Firefish/Mastodon
glad to see them not go down the vlemmy path
Yes, that’s reassuring. Also, nice to see their main website, I never actually noticed it existed
Damn, lemmy.zip, eh? If that instance is public, I don’t see that being a good thing.
Tons of businesses, people, etc, are all banning .zip and .mov TLDs for security purposes. I’ve personally banned all those domains from my network as well.
Bold move.
i don’t doubt there have been a lot of cases of those tlds used for scams but i haven’t been negatively effected by this instances domain name.
feel free to read the discussion about it here though
I can’t open that link because I block .zip domains lol
Frick, my website uses .ml and it’s gone.
Lost mine too, had an .ml domain for testing servers. Was baffled why the DNS won’t resolve, then I see this.
Crap, sorry to hear that
First I join Vlemmy.net and then FMHY.ML… I am afraid whatever instance I join next will collapse 😭
I’m sorry but for the good of all instances I’m afraid you will need to become a lurker 😔
Are you me? Same instances, same order…
…same fear.
I also joined vlemmy.net and it came down between fmhy.ml and sh.itjust.works. Guess I got lucky!
What about lemmy.ml? Can govt just take their domain?
I think in theory yes, since the .ml tld is now managed by the Mali government instead of some guy that had an agreement with them.
Is Mali gov just removing all DNS records without warning?
No respect for existing contracts, or at least some heads up a couple of months earlier.Governments just love doing stuff whenever they can, because what are you gonna do? This is a country under a military junta, there is no legal process to get back the domain.
They just handed off the management of .ml domains to a third party on a ten-year contract, and the contract is now ending.
So I guess Mali is honouring its contracts, and I doubt the third party provided anyone with contracts going beyond the ten year period they could guarantee for. I doubt the third party provided contracts at all to be honest.
Freenom (the third party in question) has been pretty shady for years. I got burned with their free .tk names a few times back in the day.
I posted this on another thread about this, but I’ll repost it here:
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.
Fantastic tool; thank you. I’ve been keeping 2 accounts—just in case—and this simplifies it significantly.
Super useful, thanks! 👍
Makes me wonder what’s going to happen to lemmy.ml if the Mali government is taking back their domains.
All of my posts on other instances are gone now :/
Now that we see things like this can happen, maybe we can make it easier to resolve going forward.
Prolly a noob question but why was the .ml TLD chosen in the first place?
It was free
I can see that it’s enticing to get a free domain… But domain costs are trivial. Like $10 a year, why risk it?
Well, I guess they just learned the hard way
The scuttlebutt is that it’s a inside joke by the far-left dev of lemmy to stand for marxist-leninist, but it’s just as likely, if not more, that it was chosen because it’s free.
Keep in mind that most (all?) two-letter TLDs are associated with a country. This includes stuff like
.io,.tv, and.me
I hope FMHY comes back. Didn’t realise how much I liked it until it was gone.
Does this have anything to do with the whole email thing from the American military? According to the financial times, there are about 117.000 emails send to .ML addresses instead of .MIL…
But they only took the domain name, not the server? So it should be no issue to just get another domain, change a bit of config on the system and web server, and be up and running in no time?
Sure, but depending on which timezone they are in, it could be nighttime for them
