The fact that people were registering .ml domains for projects like this is mindboggling. There are many TLDs to pick from without infringing on the terms of use of a country-specific one.
My thoughts exactly. You should not be choosing TLDs that are volatile to upsets like this. Stick with the tried and true .com or .net, or one of the new TLDs that are not bound to a nation (unless you can comply with the stipulations) or particular type of organization.
Back in the day, like early 90’s when they were managed by the university, they also hand reviewed each request. I had a customer with a registered company name something like “Wood Supplies Canada Inc.” and they wanted “woodsuppliescanada.ca”. They rejected it because “…canada.ca” was superfluous …
You don’t even need to be a citizen or PR, you just need to have “a Canadian presence”, which can be as simple as owning a trademark registered in Canada
No, practically speaking the domain name should have no effect on access time. DNS has so many layers of caching that as long as SOMEONE has accessed the website nearby (including you), the domain lookup will be local and therefore fast.
Anyway, DNS lookup times, even slow ones, are still not going to be noticable to the end use originally.
And you spread that server load by selecting different servers. While what you’re saying is technically true, in a practical sense if everyone picked a more local server that would be one way to achieve what you’re saying.
Hello there stranger. As completely factually appointed ambassador of lemmy.zip, I’d like to extend a warm welcome to all and am glad to see you’ve discovered our existence.
Yeah I wasn’t thrilled when I heard the news. I have one maybe two domains with Google and I’m going to be shipped off to somw third party for my renewal. I haven’t checked but I’m pretty sure the domain business is being sold to one of those “build your website with us in half an hour” companies and I just cannot wait for the go-daddy like service…which I left go-daddy because of.
I think they are selling to square space and I think their website builder is pretty damn good actually, but not sure if I’d want to buy a domain from them unless it’s for a site hosted on squares space. I mean, they don’t exactly specialice on selling domains, but then again not really did google eather so we’ll see how the service will be I quess.
I’d like to mention that Google Domains and Charleston Road Registry are two separate entities. One merely sold domains and the other submitted TLDs to ICANN.
.com and .net are under US jurisdiction they are not stateless. I could also see why the original lemmy developers would not want to use such a domain.
That may be technically true, but both TLDs are ubiquitous and it’s extraordinarily unlikely that the US will suddenly start confiscating millions of .com and .net domain names operated by non-Americans.
Do people not remember back in the 2010s when bit.ly was the main link shortener used everywhere on the internet, and then Ghadafi, the then dictator of Libya, declared the site to be incompatible with Muslin decency norms because it was used for porn? And then all bit.ly links were just dead links?
How many times do we have to learn this lesson? Domain name hacks are fun but just not worth it. And in 2023, now we have all the new TLDs. This was a dumb decision
Well, and it’s not like this should take anyone by surprise, it’s been 10 years coming. Unless Mali was telling people not to worry and then did an about face? I haven’t seen anything to indicate that.
For anyone that wants to learn more about internet domains, the MKBHD Waveform podcast has an awesome episode about this topic. It’s a super interesting listen where they talk about how the internet works and one of the organizations behind it (ICANN).
The fact that people were registering .ml domains for projects like this is mindboggling. There are many TLDs to pick from without infringing on the terms of use of a country-specific one.
I’m just pretty staunch about not paying for a domain name, they add no value whatsoever
Heh, what a tool. Nothing’s stopping him from just using ip addresses, or the reverse that whoever provides the server ip almost guaranteed have set up. But no, he wants a fancy looking one, so it HAS some value or he wouldn’t need one, and a domain require name servers, and people administrating and maintaining it. He just don’t want to pay for that part. And come on, a domain is like 15 dollars a year?
Bear in mind this was two years ago. Lemmy was small back then. I can understand someone not being able to justify the price of a domain name at that scale.
Getting a .com or .net is on the order of 20 $USD per year. Having a state attempt to claim the name is an uncommon thing (compare having a state’s domain registry be transfered to another agency or expire). Consider how long megaupload ran under a dot com name while flagrantly violating copyright laws.
The registrar that .ml uses also managed .tk and has had many allegations of hosting malicious sites ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.tk#Abuse ) and is in the process of falling apart ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34194555 ). This should have been a warning back in June when the .ga domain by the same registry was lost (and the lawsuit against the registrar back in March).
Freenom is in hot water right now. New registrations have been disabled since March, primarily due to a law suit from Meta. The company is also under investigation by the Court of Amsterdam since late last year due to a dispute with an investor, and in general doesn’t appear to have been profitable since 2016. Meanwhile, the contracts for many of the domain extensions they manage are coming up, and it is possible that Freenom may lose control of other extensions (like .ml, .cf and .gq) as well, which may result in free domains getting deleted.
Therefore, we recommend that everyone who currently is using a Freenom domain should prepare for the event that domains with their other extensions may be lost as well.
For funding, Lemmy has been funded by grants from NLNet for the past several years ( https://lemmy.ml/comment/479066 ) sufficient enough to pay for the two devs to work on it full time.
I find it not entirely credible that .ml was chosen because it was free. Maybe because they were able to get a nice name there, but that’s possible on other domains too.
In the meantime, other sites with .ml domains should probably start working on a migration path sooner than later as it would be easier to do the migration when both ends of the migration are trusted rather than trying to cold start.
Well 2y ago that’s what the marxist-leninists here claimed anyway.
Btw, that link either leads to the wrong post or jerboa is broken lol, however from the “nope” I can infer that it is meant as a refutation so fuck it.
Here’s a quote from dessalines on said post that explains it:
Its just a free domain, like .tk or .gq. I’m just pretty staunch about not paying for a domain name, they add no value whatsoever, and buying them feels like acquiescing to the digital enclosure of the commons.
So then in a sense it is marxist in nature, as this answer hints to marxist values with “buying them feels like acquiescing to the digital enclosure of the commons.”
However when this place was all marxist-leninists 2y ago, they made it very clear that it was a ML instance, by ML, for ML, and they claimed that .ml stood for marxist-leninist. As to when they decided that was no longer the case I have no clue, but that was the claim until redditors came and drowned them out a bit.
The comment was made 2 years ago - but as to whether it’s attempting to masquerade the real reasoning behind it, I can’t really say since I’m not the devs. I just thought it was worth copying over the comment contents since you mentioned you couldn’t see it, I figured there might be others who couldn’t as well!
I do appreciate it, the link for some reason leads to a completely unrelated post, but it looks like others can see it, so I think it’s a Jerboa issue.
True, we aren’t the devs so we can’t know their true intentions or thoughts, but I have my suspicions. If I trusted everyone all the time I’d be helping OJ look for Nicole’s killer rn.
I don’t pretend I can make sense of them, I just know what was claimed when I showed up 2y ago. I think the stalinists are mostly the ones that broke off to form lemmygrad iirc, as lemmy.ml was supposed to be a marxist-leninist deal, and it was one until the reddit exodus.
The official and authorized use for the TLD is an association with Mali. It doesn’t matter what hip new meaning us internet dweebs want to assign to it.
No, stop spreading this nonsense, it was never chosen because of that. It was used because it was free and the developers don’t care about creating funny names with the DNS or for glorified expensive DNS.
The fact that people were registering .ml domains for projects like this is mindboggling. There are many TLDs to pick from without infringing on the terms of use of a country-specific one.
My thoughts exactly. You should not be choosing TLDs that are volatile to upsets like this. Stick with the tried and true .com or .net, or one of the new TLDs that are not bound to a nation (unless you can comply with the stipulations) or particular type of organization.
Or if you absolutely have to, choose the TLD of a country you live in.
That works, too. I’m on lemmy.ca. Buying a .ca domain requires confirmation of citizenship or other qualification before you can even use it.
Back in the day, like early 90’s when they were managed by the university, they also hand reviewed each request. I had a customer with a registered company name something like “Wood Supplies Canada Inc.” and they wanted “woodsuppliescanada.ca”. They rejected it because “…canada.ca” was superfluous …
If I remember correctly it’s an honor system thing. You need to declare your a citizen or PR or something
You don’t even need to be a citizen or PR, you just need to have “a Canadian presence”, which can be as simple as owning a trademark registered in Canada
Other countries have different requirements so it’s good to always check in any case.
Agreed. I went with lemmy.ca since I’m Canadian and the instance is in my country.
I also heard Lemmy should perform a little quicker for me too this way.
No, practically speaking the domain name should have no effect on access time. DNS has so many layers of caching that as long as SOMEONE has accessed the website nearby (including you), the domain lookup will be local and therefore fast.
Anyway, DNS lookup times, even slow ones, are still not going to be noticable to the end use originally.
No, I meant the instance itself. The server. The one who runs lemmy.ca is here in Canada with me.
It’s like when playing a game; You choose servers closet to you for the lowest ping time.
The other reason I neglected to mention was I like to support local. 😎
It makes a difference for a game, but it’s not really significant for a website.
The server load and resources will have a much bigger impact on performances than geographic proximity.
And you spread that server load by selecting different servers. While what you’re saying is technically true, in a practical sense if everyone picked a more local server that would be one way to achieve what you’re saying.
No because the population is not even close to being uniformly distributed geographically.
Even gTLDs aren’t entirely safe. .dev is iffy right now because only Google can give those out and Google domains is going away.
.dev was stupid from the beginning due to how many local domains like that…
Alright https://lemmy.zip it is!
Edit: No way someone already did it
Hello there stranger. As completely factually appointed ambassador of lemmy.zip, I’d like to extend a warm welcome to all and am glad to see you’ve discovered our existence.
Zip is the dumbest TLD of all. It is a phishers dream come true. invoice.zip explains it.
damn that theme is nice
What the hell, how am I just hearing about this now?
They didn’t even tell domain holders.
Yeah I wasn’t thrilled when I heard the news. I have one maybe two domains with Google and I’m going to be shipped off to somw third party for my renewal. I haven’t checked but I’m pretty sure the domain business is being sold to one of those “build your website with us in half an hour” companies and I just cannot wait for the go-daddy like service…which I left go-daddy because of.
I think they are selling to square space and I think their website builder is pretty damn good actually, but not sure if I’d want to buy a domain from them unless it’s for a site hosted on squares space. I mean, they don’t exactly specialice on selling domains, but then again not really did google eather so we’ll see how the service will be I quess.
I’d like to mention that Google Domains and Charleston Road Registry are two separate entities. One merely sold domains and the other submitted TLDs to ICANN.
.com and .net are under US jurisdiction they are not stateless. I could also see why the original lemmy developers would not want to use such a domain.
That may be technically true, but both TLDs are ubiquitous and it’s extraordinarily unlikely that the US will suddenly start confiscating millions of .com and .net domain names operated by non-Americans.
Nobody said they would confiscate millions of com or net domain names or random non-Americans. We are talking about the lemmy developers specifically.
But there is no reason to get a US registered domain as a non US citizen who is also not hosted in the USA.
I really doubt they’d do that either.
Do people not remember back in the 2010s when bit.ly was the main link shortener used everywhere on the internet, and then Ghadafi, the then dictator of Libya, declared the site to be incompatible with Muslin decency norms because it was used for porn? And then all bit.ly links were just dead links?
How many times do we have to learn this lesson? Domain name hacks are fun but just not worth it. And in 2023, now we have all the new TLDs. This was a dumb decision
Dang I hope lemm.ee is safe. Hopefully Estonia doesn’t decide the same.
Well, I’m an Estonian citizen at least 😅
I didn’t even consider .ee to be a country domain. I thought you used it for the catchy name.
That’s pretty cool.
afaik all the two-character TLDs are for countries
You are correct, all two-character TLDs are country-code.
Source: https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db
🙏
This is terrible news to me, as an OCaml’eer.
There goes all my potential cool project domains … 😭
Well, and it’s not like this should take anyone by surprise, it’s been 10 years coming. Unless Mali was telling people not to worry and then did an about face? I haven’t seen anything to indicate that.
For anyone that wants to learn more about internet domains, the MKBHD Waveform podcast has an awesome episode about this topic. It’s a super interesting listen where they talk about how the internet works and one of the organizations behind it (ICANN).
ICANN and the 7 Keys to the Internet
Apple Music
Spotify
Quoted for emphasis.
They needed the one that stood for “marxist-leninist” is why, in case you were unaware.
Nope: https://lemmy.ml/comment/58293
Turns out it was free for a reason. 😅
Heh, what a tool. Nothing’s stopping him from just using ip addresses, or the reverse that whoever provides the server ip almost guaranteed have set up. But no, he wants a fancy looking one, so it HAS some value or he wouldn’t need one, and a domain require name servers, and people administrating and maintaining it. He just don’t want to pay for that part. And come on, a domain is like 15 dollars a year?
Bear in mind this was two years ago. Lemmy was small back then. I can understand someone not being able to justify the price of a domain name at that scale.
Getting a .com or .net is on the order of 20 $USD per year. Having a state attempt to claim the name is an uncommon thing (compare having a state’s domain registry be transfered to another agency or expire). Consider how long megaupload ran under a dot com name while flagrantly violating copyright laws.
The registrar that .ml uses also managed .tk and has had many allegations of hosting malicious sites ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.tk#Abuse ) and is in the process of falling apart ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34194555 ). This should have been a warning back in June when the .ga domain by the same registry was lost (and the lawsuit against the registrar back in March).
https://forum.infinityfree.net/t/all-freenom-ga-domains-are-taken-down-by-registry/77131
For funding, Lemmy has been funded by grants from NLNet for the past several years ( https://lemmy.ml/comment/479066 ) sufficient enough to pay for the two devs to work on it full time.
I find it not entirely credible that .ml was chosen because it was free. Maybe because they were able to get a nice name there, but that’s possible on other domains too.
In the meantime, other sites with .ml domains should probably start working on a migration path sooner than later as it would be easier to do the migration when both ends of the migration are trusted rather than trying to cold start.
Well 2y ago that’s what the marxist-leninists here claimed anyway.
Btw, that link either leads to the wrong post or jerboa is broken lol, however from the “nope” I can infer that it is meant as a refutation so fuck it.
Here’s a quote from dessalines on said post that explains it:
So then in a sense it is marxist in nature, as this answer hints to marxist values with “buying them feels like acquiescing to the digital enclosure of the commons.”
However when this place was all marxist-leninists 2y ago, they made it very clear that it was a ML instance, by ML, for ML, and they claimed that .ml stood for marxist-leninist. As to when they decided that was no longer the case I have no clue, but that was the claim until redditors came and drowned them out a bit.
The comment was made 2 years ago - but as to whether it’s attempting to masquerade the real reasoning behind it, I can’t really say since I’m not the devs. I just thought it was worth copying over the comment contents since you mentioned you couldn’t see it, I figured there might be others who couldn’t as well!
I do appreciate it, the link for some reason leads to a completely unrelated post, but it looks like others can see it, so I think it’s a Jerboa issue.
True, we aren’t the devs so we can’t know their true intentions or thoughts, but I have my suspicions. If I trusted everyone all the time I’d be helping OJ look for Nicole’s killer rn.
(This is what the link loads for me btw)
Which is pretty funny, because as far as I can tell, they’re actually Stalinists.
I don’t pretend I can make sense of them, I just know what was claimed when I showed up 2y ago. I think the stalinists are mostly the ones that broke off to form lemmygrad iirc, as lemmy.ml was supposed to be a marxist-leninist deal, and it was one until the reddit exodus.
but ML also can stand for Marxist Leninist and im sure has been the the way it was read by most early adopters
The official and authorized use for the TLD is an association with Mali. It doesn’t matter what hip new meaning us internet dweebs want to assign to it.
Yes, and q-tips aren’t for cleaning your ears.
The difference being that Unilever won’t confiscate your Q-Tips for cleaning out your earwax.
Yet.
lmao, sure, the ear wax cops are gonna show up at your door to raid your garbage cans for waxy cotton swabs
I have a cat that does this already… maybe I’ll get her a lil cop outfit (that she would literally kill me before wearing)
That’s why I buy store brand cotton swabs
Kinda funny considering they got the ml domain to mean Marxist-Leninist and then would get fucked by nationalization
They didn’t.
I was thinking the same thing lol
No, stop spreading this nonsense, it was never chosen because of that. It was used because it was free and the developers don’t care about creating funny names with the DNS or for glorified expensive DNS.
deleted by creator
Hey, that is me from the past.
Or machine learning. There’s at least one ML based project that got a headache out of this yesterday.
I feel like after weeks of wondering why .ml, I should’ve figured this out by myself… Beware, sleep deficit is real!