this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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Fediverse
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It's just the domain, though. That's not a big deal to change.
The instance is known by its domain name in the federation network. If that domain name changes, it's like starting a new instance from scratch.
Sounds like a complicated project to migrate communities and posts and users to a new instance without breaking something.
Federation connections are by domain name, so .. it is a big deal
Right. This will basically make nearly every /c live in .world as all of the .ml /c's go defunct. That, or Beehaw, which is walled off from everyone else.
(Side note.. my work's firewalls block everything *.ml -- and that's the only thing that saved me from creating my account there)
deploying the fediverse instances-instance communication on top of a mesh-net like yggdrasil, using their addresses as domain names, may be a quick fix without having to change the paradigm
From that point of view, yes. That'd mess things up, you're right. But from my understanding, they won't lose any data, accounts will remain, as well as subscriptions that lemmy.ml users have. Or am I wrong?
The problem is, if they don't have access to their original
.mldomain, their accounts are still tied to it. That means if they try to interact, such as subscribing to a community, when the data for that action tries to be sent back (such as updates) it'll go to the.mldomain, which they wouldn't receive.Lemmy doesn't have a built in way to just change the domain name, or really any of the ActivityPub services AFAIK. You'd have to either really do some hacky stuff to get around it (which could result in unknown issues down the line) or reset everything.
Oh, it's more complex than I expected. Thanks for explaining. I was wrong.
Most of the hacky ways around it involve retaining ownership of the old domain and leaving it up indefinitely as a pointer to the new location. If your domain is taken from you though there is not much you can do.
Seriously dumb to have used this TLD considering there are a ton of choices these days.
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.
Think about all the links to lemmy.ml