I got curious so I start digging into how mastodon do it. It’s more like a hack, really. Mastodon uses WebFinger to resolve user account, so when you change domain, you can leave the old domain up so your federated servers can still resolve your users and realized the domain has been changed and update their federation data. But it turns out you can’t exactly retire the old domain either because it’s still tied to user account internally. So if you lose control of your old domain, you’re probably as screwed as fmhy.ml.

I’d like to think FMHY was true to their name and didn’t pay for the domain.

.ee is owned by Estonia. Just pray Estonia wouldn’t do the same shenanigan and cause your instance to go down.

Who know deleting a power user account could DDOS the entire federation?

At least for Lemmy, you can “force” it to sync a particular post or comment by pasting the url into your instance’s search bar.

Storing time series data in ram so you can instantly generate pretty graph of various metrics is all the rage right now. The longer you want to keep the the data, the bigger the ram requirements. You might be wondering, why not storing the data on SSD? The answer is the bosses love pretty charts that loads INSTANTLY. The fact the the metrics database uses 200GB of RAM is not their concern.

Even worse, the free .ml domain is not actually yours when you get it for free, but actually owned by the company that previously managed the .ml domain. I suspect Mali government has reclaimed all those free domain registrations now that the contract with the company has been expired. The .ml domains that still up was probably paid domain and Mali government are probably still honoring the contract.

The problem is with the federation. Other instances will try to federate with the old domain and won’t recognize the new domain. Simply changing your domain will not update federation in other instances. AFAIK work is still underway to allow migrating to a new domain and allow other instance to recognize the domain change.

You might still buy your old .ml domain once Mali government open up registration again, assuming domain squatters doesn’t grab it first.

Afaik mastodon has a way for instances to migrate to a new domain, but the old domain must be up during the migration process. Lemmy on the other hand don’t even have any domain migration procedure yet. People will probably go nuts about this on their GitHub issues portal.

Eh, you can self host your name system though. OpenNIC does exactly that. The problem is convincing other people to use your resolver instead of using ICANN.

Are you using the free domain deal, or are you paying for your .ml domain? I suspect they only revoking those unpaid .ml domains.

Somewhat related. Basically, the management of the .ml TLD are being handed back to Mali government, and they seem to revoking.ml domains left and right.

I suspect they’re revoking registration for .ml domains that was registered for free. the company that originally managed .ml domains had a free domain offers where you could register any .ml domain for free, the caveat is you don’t have the ownership right to that free domain. Maybe Mali government doesn’t honor such free domain registration and wish to revoke them all.

Unfortunately, no.

Currently, activitypub identity is tied to domain name. While mastodon support migration as long as the old domain is still up during the migration process, AFAIK Lemmy doesn’t even have a process to migrate an instance to a new domain yet.

So basically, if you switch your instance domain, you’ll mess up all your federation network, unless Lemmy devs implement a solution soon.

Currently, activitypub identity is tied to domain name. Mastodon support migration as long as the old domain is still up during the migration process, but AFAIK Lemmy doesn’t even have a process to migrate an instance to a new domain yet.

Someone should tell Lemmy devs and send them a crate of coffee because it’ll be a race to implement domain migration before all .ml domains got shut down.

It was doubly hilarious when the US was at war with Libya, yet the white house spokesperson and us politicians were still tweeting using bit.ly and ow.ly url shorteners.

A while ago Libya suddenly requires all companies that use .ly domain to have a presence in Libya or have their domain reclaimed by the government. bit.ly (and other internet startups that use .ly domains back then) suddenly found themselves in a precarious position. It was pretty hilarious as .ly TLD was hip back then.

Consider how many system relies on being able to send you an email for verifying your login and performing password reset. Those who have control over your email address domain can trigger password reset for most of online services out there. Imagine if Google forgot to renew gmail.com and it falls to a wrong hands.

That’s where I disagree. YouTube got this big because it’s been free for so long, it practically squeezed out all of its competitors. Now that it no longer have competitors, YouTube started charging subscription, even raising the price now.

Also, you can’t exactly compare YouTube subscription with Spotify subscription, because Spotify got its content mostly by paying records companies. YouTube on the other hand got majority of its contents for free from their users, just like Reddit and Twitter. Even if you subscribe to YouTube premium, the majority of those video owners will never get any money from YouTube.

YouTube Music is more comparable to Spotify, but why bundle it with YouTube premium and raised the subscription price instead of offering it as a separate product and keep the base YouTube subscription cheap so it’ll make more sense for most people.

I wonder if most of the complaints of ads on YouTube are coming from people who subscribe to something like Netflix, but spend just as much (or more) time streaming YouTube.

Actually I don’t watch YouTube that much, probably just one video per week or even less. But everytime I tried to watch a video in YouTube app, I got bombarded with ads. So what should happen to people like me who don’t watch YouTube that much but don’t want to see ads? Clearly paying the full subscription price is not worth it in this case, especially when I already have a Spotify family subscription.