Unfortunately what seems to be the cached version of lemmy.fmhy.ml is now slowly disappearing from Cloudflare. Those 2 comments have now been lost as well along with most of the content.
From what I can gather losing the domain means losing the instance. Obviously that sucks but if I was designing Lemmy I wouldn’t think of “what if the Malian government suddenly decides not?”.
The reason they haven’t yet come back to another instance is they’re trying to work out how to migrate and keep the instance while not breaking anything.
It’s not lemmy as a whole is it? I thought the main url is lemmy.org. It’s only a couple of instances that used .ml.
There’s join-lemmy.org, but that’s just a list of instances.
There’s no “main URL” to a decentralized space. There’s only the URLs of participating websites.
Thank you. It’s been over a month and still haven’t quite got my head round the fediverse!
This is more like activitypub problem. You can’t really change domain in activitypub. Even in mastodon, you can only add another alias domain. Losing your original domain is catastrophic. I’m actually interested whether the activitypub devs are finally going to address this. I’m also interested to see what kind of hack FMHY use in order to save their instance.
Not a (permanent) solution, just a very (very, very,…) stupid idea, that I am not even sure would work.
What happened? They don’t own the domains anymore, the DNS records were removed so those domains don’t resolve to anything. But maybe they could be locally resolved by each instance. I added these entries to my /etc/hosts file when the DNS records were deleted:
104.21.81.71 lemmy.fmhy.ml
#172.67.140.145 lemmy.fmhy.ml
#188.114.97.3 www.fmhy.ml
188.114.96.3 www.fmhy.ml
This allowed me access to FMHY (while it was still up).
Even if this worked, why would it be stupid? Well it would have to be manually set by each instance. And those IP addresses may change from time to time, so it would have to be manually updated again, by every instance.
A thanks for the IP addresses to dnshistory.org (fmhy.ml) and whoever wrote this comment: https://lemmy.fmhy.ml/comment/1231585 (lemmy.fmhy.ml)
This doesn’t solve the main problem thought, in which the instance can no longer federate with other instance via activitypub. You can’t expect other instances to manually override their DNS in order to federate with fmhy again. Also, https will break as soon as their current certificate expires, at which point no instances can federate with fmhy even with dns override.
Hopefully this issue will force activitypub developers to rethink their approach with domain handling.
