Another win for the decentralized Fediverse when a government domain takeback can’t shut it down!

Mali has decided to take back .ml from people who took advantage of the free domain like fmhy.ml & maybe lemmy.ml - https://lemmy.world/post/1915581

And while it sucks for those servers & those users may have to migrate, the #Fediverse and it’s plethora of platforms continues on. 💪 💜

@fediverse #lemmy #mastodon #calckey #mali #decentralization

freamon
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1312Y

That’s a very positive spin on quite a shitty situation (especially if lemmy.ml goes kaputt)

@[email protected]
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422Y

I mean, the .ml domain belongs to Mali and they have every right to take it back.

“Every right”? No. They have the power to do so but that doesn’t make it right. They sold those domains fair and square. Contracts were signed.

Domains aren’t sold, they are leased for a period of time. In this case the lease was for ten years and is lapsing now.

freamon
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412Y

True. It might have been better though if the Lemmy devs hadn’t been such cheapskates and forked over the 10 bucks it takes to get a domain name that isn’t sketchy.

@[email protected]
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162Y

Did we know before it’s sketchy?

RxBrad
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92Y

My work uses zScaler for its Internet web filters. zScaler has everything *.ml blocked.

So yeah, it’s fairly well-known to be sketchy.

@[email protected]
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32Y

.ml is just Mali’s country domain. Maybe your workplace should get a better filter?

Quokka
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2Y

Or maybe realising anything ending in .ml was most likely spam and if it caught the 5 legitimate Mali domains oh well, zero loss for anyone.

Kinda like how I wouldn’t download a file from a .ru site.

@[email protected]
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-32Y

deleted by creator

@[email protected]
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192Y

The parent domain was apparently well known to be a common host of phishing domains and scam sites. Free domains tend to attract those types, so that’s a good reason from the start not to use that if you want your site to be reliably accessible and findable on search engines.

Dee
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82Y

I did, I just messed up and didn’t tell anybody. I’m sorry folks, this is on me.

Yes. Hosting a service in a country other than where a TLD is designated for is bad practice and common knowledge for any web developer

Guess nobody told youtu.be or the million of services on .to or .it…

.be and .to are free to use by anyone as set by the respective countries registrars, anyone that registers a .it domain outside of Europe is just asking for trouble

Do Belgium and Italy have different policies?

@[email protected]
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132Y

lemmy.ml was a sort of prototype made by the devs of the lemmy software. It wasn’t really meant for widespread public adoption. So it makes sense that they went with a free domain.

001100 010010
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82Y

Lol they could’ve just spend $10 from the donations they receive to secure an actual .com domain

Zagorath
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162Y

Pretty sure they went with .ml not for price reasons, but because they liked to pretend it stood for their political ideology.

Tywele [she|her]
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232Y

They stated themselves that it was for price reasons.

freamon
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82Y

Maybe. I read the idea about it standing for Marxist/Leninist, but there’s thousands of TLDs now - if you can get .diamonds and .world, there’s probably something that would evoke the same lefty idea (although maybe lemmy pre-dates the new domains, I don’t know)

Flax
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72Y

New domains have been around for a while. The fancy ones are a bit more pricey.

@freamon Agreed, it’s a silver lining post, for sure.

But generally I find people say “you see, this is why the Fediverse/Lemmy/Mastodon etc will never take off” for every blip of bad news or whatever. But in reality, while the news sucks for .ml servers, it highlights the resiliency of the Fediverse - which is a win.

And better to happen in the early days of Lemmy than when/if it got much bigger.

P03 Locke
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92Y

Newsflash: It’s getting bigger as we speak. Prepare for all of the scalability problems now, not later when it’s even harder to fix.

@[email protected]
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72Y

You say that as though there’s some kind of crystal ball we can all look into and see all of the obstacles that will need to be cleared and prepare accordingly. That’s not how scaling web services works, especially distributed ones that are built on a relatively new protocol.

@freamon can you imagine if Lemmy (in total) was just *poof* grabbed by a government?

The fediverse lives to ride another day.

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