the argument for .ml domain has always been absurd to begin with. So it’s free but the price you pay is that it’s being run by Mali. I’d just drop 8$/year tbh, that’s not a hill you want to die for. Also you harm your project by being SEO punished for using spam-associated TLDs like this. One of the reasons original Lemmy took so long to adopt until Reddit’s API drama. Pretty dumb ngl.
If i remember right it was also “free to register but insanely expensive to renew once they start to see traffic”
Renewal costs are my primary consideration when picking domains. Subscription fees is how your money disappears when you’re not looking.
Anyone know how companies get the rights to domains to sell in the first place? Do they literally submit a list of all domains to ICANN or something? Sorry if this is a stupid question, I just never understood how any of this really works.
Well kinda feels like my house burned down.
Hopefully the push towards some kind of direct migration comes on the feels of this.
Man, hacking, DDOS and now this. The fediverse just can’t catch a break…
Would help if users spread out over all the running servers because problem is just a few lemmy servers have all the users. For example the instance I run would be a simple proxy to use for all the content and then would mitigate issues when a big server had problems since just parts of the fediverse would be affected from the users pov.
I feel like communities are the bigger problem here. And not one that’s easily solved.
If users from multiple instances come together in communities, those communities are still centralized on a single server. So if something happens to that server, or if your instance defederates with it, the whole community goes with it.
The alternative would be to have tons of duplicate communities spread over many instances, but that’s a bad user experience.
Jesum Crow… Tags aren’t a new concept. Just group communities with a tag… is that incredibly complicated to implement or something?
There needs to be a way for a person or group to essentially own a tag to enable moderation. It might be one of those rare problems for which a block chain is a good solution, because there would need to be a public ledger showing who is a moderator for a tag at any given moment.
There is no need to own a tag, nor to tack blockchain into a problem to try and sell a solution. Ever.
At this stage in the game, I’m not even sure how to evaluate the trustworthiness of instances. Which also applies to the one I’m currently on. I’d like to assume everything is good, but admins do have power that can be abused, like visibility of IP addresses, access to accounts, access to passwords (reusing passwords is bad but especially don’t do it here and certainly don’t use the same password for your email associated with your account).
Facebook abused those powers (zuck even bragged about being able to see everyone’s passwords, emails, private messages, pictures), so did Reddit (though more with shadow banning or quietly removing/restoring posts).
Fediverse instances are just run by random people as far as I can tell. I’m sure there’s some that should absolutely be avoided and I’m sure that there’s some that are perfectly fine. But I don’t have a clue how to determine which list about specific instance is in, otherwise I’d love to join someone’s small instance.
Edit: oh and that only goes into whether the admin is acting in good faith or intends to be abusive. Then there’s the question of whether the admin is competent enough to run a server without it getting pwnt and giving others access to that same information and capabilities.
You are correct. A lot of the internet is built on trust. This is no exception. I suggest having an account in more than one instance so that you are not too vested into 1 place.
the problem is most users fear that if they choose a small instance, that it goes down random more likely and their account and everything else is gone. if you choose a bigger instance it feels less likely that the admin of the instance just says fuck it and kills the server random for whatever reason.
as long accounts can’t be easy transfered and are maybe even safe somehow without their instance, people will choose the instance that feels the most secure to them. and when i looked at the available instances… most looked not really long term secure. most did look like they are random ideas of people and they could vanish any second into the void. so i as an example did choose lemmy.world. seemed the most safe option with the best features (nsfw allowed, a lot of users and a big instance)
On a small instance, you have greater opportunities to take action to positively support that instance. You can make friends with the administrator, volunteer to become an administrator yourself, donate cash to offset running costs, lodge helpful reports, welcome new users, etc…
I understand the logic but its actually backwards. A small instance like mine is easily paid for totally out my own pocket and requires no outside funding or maintenance because I can do everything. If too few people donate to major instances then the costs starts to run away from the owners. In some ways becoming too large is a problem.
i understand that, but think about it - its a random instance from a random stranger on the internet. you don’t know that person, and don’t know if he is actually serious interested in that project of running that instance… or if he will shut it down maybe a few day, weeks or months in the future.
and you can’t really backup your account and load it somewhere else, so if this happens everything you saved and do is GONE. thats a huge risk if you value your account and contribution to communitys.
so it doesn’t really matters to me if smaller instances are not expensive etc… thats not what fears people (there are still ways to spread users along more instances but more even). its the suddenly vanishing without warning that scares people.
i had this often enough with similiar other projects where i created a account on such a small community / instance, was really active… and suddenly it was just gone from one second to the next without warning. everything gone. admin didn’t told anyone about it… was just gone into thin air.
so it feels safer to go to instances who are more “trustworthy” in the longterm security of a stable operation.
if lemmy would support export of accounts maybe ever month once or something… that would change things. also allow spoofing of stuff, but it would help with vanishing instances and people would feel safer on smaller more unknown instances.
“i understand that, but think about it - its a random instance from a random stranger on the internet. you don’t know that person, and don’t know if he is actually serious interested in that project of running that instance… or if he will shut it down maybe a few day, weeks or months in the future.”
Have to be honest with you, that is how all yhe instances started including lemmy.world.
“so it feels safer to go to instances who are more “trustworthy” in the longterm security of a stable operation.”
There is no metric by which to know this yet as lemmy is new. Its not like there are 5 servers that are 10 years old and al the rest are just starting up. Just how it is.
Have to be honest with you, that is how all yhe instances started including lemmy.world.
but now they have enough reputation & users to make them feel like the safest option
There is no metric by which to know this yet as lemmy is new. Its not like there are 5 servers that are 10 years old and al the rest are just starting up. Just how it is.
compared with random instances with 2-3 users or so, a instance who is there since the beginning / relative long compared to other is safer feeling tho.
i’m so worried about this topic, that i even think about maybe setting up my own instance just to keep my accounts etc safe & from vanishing.
I feel like you have missed the points im my previous comments but if you just want to feel safer because in your heart of hearts this instance or that instance just feels safer then go for it.
My advice does not change. Make a backup account on another instance to avoid being burned. If you dont want to, then its now on you.
Resiliency is the strongpoint.
If Reddit shuts down, all of Reddit dies.
Same with Facebook, YouTube, etc. is that highly unlikely? Well, yeah, but still nonzero. The fediverse offers resiliency in this regard, and no one person has the ability to shut it down. Even if all instances decide to shut down, new instances can still be spun up.
lemmygrad.ml and lemmy.ml are gone? So sad.
Anyway.
Unfortunately, it seems the tankies are gonna tank right on (over the bodies of students).
Best comment
Seriously it’s like no one knows how to use the internet (erm, to learn about teh innernets).
When in doubt, Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_code_top-level_domain?wprov=sfla1
A lot of people should be concerned about this for .me domains as well (Montenegro)
I think that’s different because the .ml domain apparently was being given away for free by a registrar that wasn’t responding to abuse complaints, and thus was being heavily abused.
…but if not, then holy shit what a mistake it was to register
firstname@lastname.meas my primary email address.
Hi, professional DNS engineer here! if anyone has any questions about the inner workings of DNS or top level domains, ask away! (THIS IS MY MOMENT)
Link to the actual post OP screenshotted: https://very.bignutty.xyz/notes/9hf13it1ced3b2za
Screenshots of text are not the way. The crappy “hey, a text thing I want to share, let me take an accessibility-poisoning screenshot and upload that graphic file like a psychopath instead of just copy/pasting either the link to the text or the text itself like a decent human being” routine needs to die with Reddit, we have to be better than that here.
At the least, put the screenshot and the link in the post. We can do both, people.
Screenshots of text preserve the state of the text at the time it was seen…
Yes, it’s not good for accessibility but it’s a good way to quickly capture a moment in time.
(I would recommend perhaps also copy/pasting a synopsis for people who might be vision impaired etc)
So copy/paste the text for your snapshot, and link to the original.
I did share it. It’s in the comments.
Screenshots stay with time, I hate it when I arrive a bit later and the link is already dead and I have no idea what it said.
If you can post an image, you can post text, right?
…except when the image hoster suddenly dies and 10000s of Screenshots suddenly vanish from the internet and all howto’s etc are killed by it
That’s why you shouldn’t use external image hosters but embed the picture the normal way. Then if the lemmy instance dies then the screenshot dies with it but not seperatelly.
well, often webprojects don’t have that much money and hosting communitys who post a lot of images, videos etc. costs a lot of money. because that a lot of users use imagehosters to bypass this issue.
Copy/pasted text stays with time too and doesn’t have the issues that pictures of text do. Also hosted images disappear all the time.
Using .ml was stupid in the first place. No need to try to be a special snowflake by using a sketchy TLD.
I wonder if it was done on purpose after it came out that the Pentagon had typo’d “.ml” instead of ‘.mil’ and exposed a lot of sensitive emails…
Highly doubtful much of anything majorly sensitive got leaked. Firstly even unclassified DoD emails are encrypted by default. Secondly anything classified isn’t even on a network that can talk to normal email, it’s either 100% point to point encrypted or on an airgapped network. If I hopped on SIPR (DoD Secret-level internet) and emailed a normal email address it simply wouldn’t work.
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Why was .ml selected to begin with?
.ml stands for Marxist/Leninist apparently. Communists try not to let idealism get in the way of practicality challenge(impossible)
To be fair this is a pretty crazy black swan event they couldn’t have possibly seen coming. But yeah, this is why novelty domain suffixes are novelties.
It was totally possible to see coming. The .ml domain deal and its expiration was known far in advance and I’ve been seeing posts about it for months.
This is 100% incompetence on whoever set up the site.
Lemmy was started in 2019. And before the Reddit meltdown, it was more a bunch of very nerdy friends for whom a server going down was Tuesday.
No that’s not true… .ml is the TLD for Mali and lemmy.ml selected it because it was free… This claim you’re making is like people claiming AC/DC stands for anti-christ devil-child. No, it’s electrical currents, hence the lightning bolt…
With that said, they did censor anti-china rhetoric, had many pro-china trolls/brainwashed users, and started censoring words, including “bitch.” So I’m not defending the instance. But this claim about what .ml means is just blatantly false! It’s a country’s TLD!
Always thought it’s a play on machine learning, but I’m most probably wrong.
Out of curiosity, other than fmhy.ml, lemmy.ml, and lemmygrad.ml, what other Lemmy instances were using .ml domains? Also, how are the latter two still running but fmhy.ml isn’t?
edit: This has triggered a chain of comments I wasn’t expecting. I’d appreciate it if someone can answer on a technical level. Is the latter two using a different registrar or name server which is why it still works for them?
Why are so many instances using .ml anyway?
AFAIK, lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml use it because the ml can also stand for “Marxist-Leninist”, and the two primary maintainers of Lemmy are Marxist-Leninists . Not sure about the others though.
I’m going to have to make a copy paste for this:
.ml stands for Mali.
.ee stands for Estonia.
.tv stands for Tuvalu
Just like .ca stands for Canada.
this is technically true, but it’s not why lemmygrad, ran by full on communists, chose the .ml tld
Stalinists, not communism
It’s funny you’re getting down votes for this. ML was literally created as the official formulation of Marxism & Leninism for the USSR by Stalin.
Reactionary Stalin/China/etc stans try to frame themselves as communists and don’t like it when it’s called out. They’re like qanonists with a different cult leader.
.ml was the main Lemmy before .world Most communities were there.
Yes I know, the owners of lemmygrad/lemmy.ml created lemmy
Do you have a source for that statement?
That’s not true at all. ML was used as an idiological choice as it’s the only free TLD you can get and you should not have to pay for a domain name as per Lemmy’s creators ideology.
That’s not true. There are a few other free TLDs. I think five total?
It can also definitely stand for Machine Learning which is the first thing that comes to my mind
Yes but lemmy has nothing to do with Machine Learning.
Yes, but as discussed several times here and there Lemmy Devs are pro china and anti USA and they admin lemmy.lm. in this case LM stays for Marxism Leninism.
Hey now, what’s with all the logic and stuff. We only allowing jumping to conclusions around these parts, you should know better than that.
/s
It’s not jumping to conclusions; it’s actually pretty well-known. The devs and their instance are very open about being Marxist-Leninists.
I don’t see how machine learning is related to Lemmy in any way
Okay, fair enough. So…we getting back to Lemmy now?
Edit:
It really is an interesting social experiment when talking in neutral tones about people with communist beliefs. So I said are we getting back to Lemmy now and I get a battering of downvotes, okay I struck a nerve, but why? I’m pretty “far left” in my beliefs but we are all here aren’t we?
It’s just interesting to see people say “well you can change instances!” Yeah, but the devs are still the devs - just because they’re not running those instances doesn’t mean they’re not the father or grandfather of those alternate instances. So your beliefs make you take a stance on the instance you choose, but not the software? How do you reconcile that?
As far as the developers go, I think they created a great piece of software, but I trust the open source community to vet like they always do with all open source software, let’s see where this goes. I think the developers want to see the world in a way that just isn’t compatible with our current evolutionary state. They stated that they have their beliefs, and what they expect of their communities is kindness, and consideration towards others. So far, I’m good with that.
I mean, the concepts of Marxism are actually quite noble. But there’s no doubt about it. The system fails because the people never end up in control, it simply doesn’t work. I just feel these devs simply live in the clouds too much and are not grounded in reality. I’m not sure how old they are, but they may not have lived enough life to realize we’re not a people evolved enough to support a true balanced socialist lifestyle - the best we can do is try to interject social programs into our capitalist lifestyle, as it is today, to fill the gaps that a capitalist society leaves behind.
I think it’s because ML is a popular shorthand for ‘Marxist-Leninist’ since they mostly seem to be communist servers
.ml stands for Mali.
.ee stands for Estonia.
.tv stands for Tuvalu
Just like .ca stands for Canada.
You are technically correct, but surely you must know at this point that’s not at all how domains are used on the internet. Bit.ly isn’t hosted or affiliated with Libya.
And if you ever doubted that the maintainers of Lemmy are tankies, well have I got a post from you, from the horse’s mouth:
https://www.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/cqgztr/fuck_the_white_supremacist_reddit_admins_want_me/
Hey all, longtime Marxist-leninist, recorder of left audiobooks, and megathread shitposter here.
Posting this in light of a recent one week Reddit ban I earned for shitting on US police, as I’m sure many of us have gotten in recent weeks.
So I’ve spent the past few months working on a self hostable, federated, Reddit alternative called Lemmy, and it’s pretty much ready to go. Unlike here we’d have ultimate control over all content, and would never have to self censor.
Obviously as communists, we agitate where the people are, so we should never abandon Reddit entirely, but it’s been clear to all of us from day one, that communities like this stand on unsteady ground, and could be banned or quarantined at any moment by the white supremacist Reddit admins. This would be both a backup and a potentially better alternative. Moderation abilities are there, as well as a slur filter.
Raddle isn’t an option obviously since it’s run by this arch anti tankie scum, ziq.
I wanted to ask ppl here if they’d like me to host an instance, and mod all the current mods here.
The instance that post mentions at the end became Lemmygrad. Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad are the same people. They chose “.ml” because they are Marxist-Leninists. They first advertised on /r/communism and that post outright states they’re Marxist-Leninists.
Thinking they chose .ml because they really like Mali is absolutely ridiculous.
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.
I’ve never felt that country TLDs were worth using and this has only cemented that opinion for me
Thanks, I know what it stands for but I am trying to explain why that particular top-level domain was picked for those lemmy instances
.ml was the main Lemmy before .world Most communities were there.
Thats not a rebuttal. The .ml instance is run by Marxist-Leninists
I’m guessing because it’s sort of an alliteration on lemmy?
It was free
And
Lemmy creators are Marxist Leninists
It was free, and anonymous I guess
It’s not anonymous. In fact because it’s free it requires more data to prevent someone from acquiring all of the domain names.
It was free
.ml was a terrible name anyways. People just kept saying everyone was a tannkie whether or not true. Not the image that’s going to help you grow or your ideological goals imo
how does ML make people it’s tankies?
edit: nvm comments lower say Marxist/leninist
I’m new to the fediverse and not sure how it works just yet. Can someone help me understand? My account was created on Lemmy.ml, will it no longer work and I’ll have to make another?
I would make a lemmy world account personally, it’s tough to say what will happen long term with .ml domains. Even if your account still works, it may by hampered getting posts from the rest of the fediverse. Worst case scenario you have account on two popular lemmy instances.
Are you aware that ml in lemmy.ml stands for marxism-leninism and that the admins of your instance don’t support any critique of the chinese government? I’m asking because I think a lot of new users chose lemmy.ml randomly - mostly because it was big - and if they knew this, many of them would have chosen differently.
I had no clue. I was just tired of Reddit and when looking into Lemmy the .ml one came up first in the search. Guess I get to make a new one somewhere else.
They chose .ml because it was free. They don’t delete comments just because they don’t agree with them. I don’t get why some people feel the need to spread lies about the lemmy devs/lemmy.ml admins just for being in favour of communism.
Is this because of the DoD typo leaks? Lol
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changeover provoked the leak.
that is nonsense. the leak was there before the change, but after the change consequences of the leak could be more dangerous.oh, you mean leak as in public knowledge of the problem and i am talking about the leak caused be emails ending up in wrong hands.
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Maybe they can help us out and take down Lemmygrad while they’re at it
