There at least needs to be some extensions. I'm thinking of methods of secure migration (both instance: domain to domain and user: instance to instance) and a method for adopting a community that existed on a now offline instance.
All services, except Lemmy, is up and running again via the new domain: fmhy.net
Lemmy itself will require a significant database cleanup to get users transferred, posts and communities may not be possible
Cleanup will have to be done either manually or with a custom script
And now to answer some common questions I’ve seen floating around:
Why is lemmy.ml not affected? WE DON’T KNOW. My assumption is that it’s popular (or lucky enough) to not be affected by this change. The only difference between our two domains is that lemmy.ml doesn’t use CF, and AFAIK, multiple other domains (with and without cf) are still unreachable.
Why can’t you just change the domain? That’s not how federation works. Most services (including Mastodon and Lemmy) do not support changing URL properly, as doing so could potentially break the whole network.
Why is it taking so long to get back up? Not all staff members have access to the server, CF, or domain registrar. Not to mention that this is a complicated task that requires a lot of effort, and one that we didn’t even know we had to do until the following morning. (We were under the assumption that the .ml TLD didn’t just explode.)
I’m starting this off by saying that I’m looking for any type of reasonably advanced photo manipulation tool, that runs natively under Linux. It doesn’t have to be FOSS....
I hope we see more composable desktop apps in the FOSS space so that we can at least get more UI options for a given backend. Maybe then we can get closer to what users want. The other option more low code options, so users with more domain expertise and build UXs like they want.
For the fun of it, here’s a summary written by ChatGPT regarding its overlord’s plan for AI governance:
OpenAI and other leading AI labs, coordinated by the White House, are making voluntary commitments to increase the safety, security, and transparency of AI technologies. These practices are designed to guide AI governance and will remain in effect until related regulations are established.
Key commitments include:
Red-teaming of models to identify potential misuse, societal risks, and security concerns. Companies commit to advancing research in this area and will publicly disclose their red-teaming and safety procedures.
Promoting information sharing between companies and governments regarding trust and safety risks, emergent capabilities, and attempts to bypass safeguards.
Investment in cybersecurity and insider threat safeguards to protect proprietary and unreleased model weights.
Encouraging third-party discovery and reporting of issues and vulnerabilities in AI systems.
Developing mechanisms to allow users to understand if audio or visual content is AI-generated. This includes the creation of provenance and/or watermarking systems for AI-generated content.
Reporting model capabilities, limitations, and domains of appropriate and inappropriate use publicly, including discussion of societal risks such as fairness and bias.
Prioritizing research on societal risks posed by AI systems, including harmful bias, discrimination, and privacy protection.
Commitment to developing frontier AI systems to help address society’s greatest challenges like climate change, cancer detection and prevention, and cyber threats.
These commitments are applicable to generative models more powerful than the current industry standard models.
It would have hurt early on, but no so much now. They locked the instance down, quit accepting new users, and banned users being able to create communities themselves stating that the goal of the instance was to be a carefully curated one and they considered it “complete” and no new communities would be created.
They’re not even in the top 15 instances by users anymore.
The biggest impact would be that Lemmy.ml is the developers instance but I imagine they have backups of everything and would just register on a different domain and transfer everything and everyone.
@renwillis I'm not so sure this is a "win", since the Fediverse wasn't specifically targeted by any entity involved to begin with. If anything, it's just a straight-up loss to the communities that have to reassemble themselves under a new domain again, many of whom were probably mostly new users to the Fediverse to begin with, and are likely to be turned off by this experience. If anything, this just exposes that the Fediverse is significantly sustained by flimsy, free/cheap platforms that are vulnerable to disappearing without any notice. That doesn't exactly instill faith.
A domain takedown was never able to shut a server down, not even with centralized servers. Most big services are accessible via multiple domains of different countries, and this would just disable one of them. But for the Fediverse that means that they also “disabled” an entire instance with all its users.
This actually shows us that relying on domains can be a problem for the Fediverse! Imo we need to upgrade the federation protocol to be able to handle these things, like propagating a domain change or migrating accounts to other instances.
lmfao, frickin seriously? you’re gonna build up an instance where the domain is part of all of your users’ identities and you’re not even gonna spend the $10/yr to keep that solid? with how much time goes into running a lemmy instance and not getting overrun by bots, that’s an absolutely ridiculous assignment of resources
You have to remember that until recently, there was sub 100 daily users, this wasn’t a big platform, and it wasn’t just lemmy.ml, but a bunch of <10 user instances.
It wasn’t worth paying for a small side project until it wasn’t and at that point it was too late, plus who would have predicted that the gov of Mali would forcefully take back all of their domains?
I’ve owned a .com domain for over a decade, ever since BEFORE I actually had a job and was living on allowances, and it still doesn’t register as an expense to me.
The content I host on that domain has been used by 3 different people tops, which is me and a couple of my friends. It’s still worth it.
If I were to build a public-facing service I’d certainly fork over the bare minimum to guarantee that it fucking stays up even if I don’t expect thousands of users. It’s just a matter of doing things properly. Free domains have always been sketchy as fuck, every scam ever was hosted on a .tk domain at some point.
But as it has been stated multiple times already, the only reason they actually went with “.ml” is because they thought it would be funny for the marxist-leninist association. That’s literally it. It’s not about money. Anyone with access to a dev machine has 10 dollars a year to spend or they wouldn’t be shitposting on the internet.
Lemmy as a whole not being hurt even if some domains are gone is the entire point of being decentralized. But yeah, it’s really bad that communities made there will also be gone as it is now.
We need user and community migration like Mastodon has, and quick.
I might be unaware of some technical issues here but why not just get another domain, point it at the server, then update the database to change all references to lemmy.ml to thenewdomain.tld and then make an announcement on a couple of the bigger instances? Federation will take care of propagating the news far and wide. Then, as users hear the news they can just login using the same details and those of us subscribed to Communities on .ml can just update our subscriptions.
I mean, it’s not a perfect solution but it’ll work, surely?
It’s my understanding that this isn’t possible. Migrating domains in Lemmy is not supported though it is possible with some very hacky solutions like you’re describing. But the old domain needs to be retained indefinitely as a pointer to the new domain or it will break federation with other instances. If they lose control of the domain or can’t keep it basically forever then federation will break. They can potentially migrate users and posts, but it is effectively like resetting and starting over as a new instance.
Right, but if Mali do reclaim all the .ml domains out there then there’s little option? Yes, federation will break for .ml and yes it’ll be like starting over on a fresh instance but only in terms of federation - all the users, communities, posts and comments will still exist, just under a new domain. Once the new domain starts federating people will catch on, especially if the news is posted on the larger instances.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying its not a problem, I’m just not sure its a total disaster either.
You’ll have to go complain directly to the W3C for that. The situation is Lemmy may fix it with some custom protocol extensions, but then it’ll still break every other piece of software that follows the spec like Mastodon, Kbin and others.
It’s like adding a 6xx status to HTTP. You technically can, but expect every standard compliant clients to be confused and bail on it.
You can’t just change domains with emails either and have everything seemlessly migrate over. Not losing a domain is not a completely unreasonable assumption to make.
Thankfully the users and communities aren’t lost, it’s just that people outside of fmhy will have to resubscribe to the communities on the new domain.
The W3C, apparently. It’s both the ID and the URL of the object if you want to refresh it. They seem to suggest doing it that way because the URL of a user profile is going to be guaranteed to be unique, and can only be owned by the owner of the domain.
Lemmy assigns it its own internal ID per instance but it’s only used internally for joins and stuff.
For example, your person ID is feddit.cl/u/nintendiator. If you curl it in ActivityPub format you’ll get your user:
Not that easily, no. With ActivityPub your user ID is tied to the instance URL. If you subscribe to a community for example, when that community tries to “honor” your subscription by sending you updates of what is happening, it’ll go to that .ml domain and be lost.
There’s no official supported way to change your instance domain other than to start fresh. They might be able to do something hacky such as change all of the domains in the database and while locally that might appear to work, I don’t know if it would work across the federation.
I do know on the instance I run, I accidentally broke the webserver config for one of the ActivityPub endpoints and the result was that when I sent out comments, it never actually got federated / published yet I can still see them from my instance. New subscriptions also didn’t work. It was as if I effectively shadow-banned the instance by accident.
Not really. Most centralized services are accessible via multiple domains, e.g. for different countries. This would just disable one of them, but users could still use another to log into their accounts. For the Fediverse it “disables” an entire instance, cuts it off from federation and locks out users.
Lets not put a positive spin on a situation that exposes a weakness of the current system. The federation protocol needs to be able to handle these things gracefully, like propagating domain changes and migrating accounts between instances!
>If a server moved their domain they had to have a way to broadcast the name change to all the other instances.
even if lemmy had a way to do this, doing it for all the users at lemmy.ml would create a large load of federated network traffic between instances, and at the level of a single instance it would cause a lot of database changes (I've heard that the sql schema for lemmy isn't very optimized).
also, as activitypub doesn't prioritize synchronization (unlike git and matrix), there could be a lot of desynchronized state, with the name change of users reaching some instance but not others.
it would be interesting if lemmy.ml really went the clean slate way (and I think the original intention of the devs in running that instance was just to test their code, not to have it become a "flagship" instance), it would sure showcase a valuable lesson in the fediverse…that you shouldn't rely too much on big instances (there is no huge facebook/twitter/reddit-like thing here).
I think most all of us here on Lemmy are people with technical background. Most of my professional contacts remained using Reddit, Twitter and even excited when Threads launched....
Sure! An adblocker is a piece of software that helps you to avoid unwanted ads when you’re surfing the internet.
Here’s how it basically works:
List of ad sources: An adblocker keeps a list of sources of ads, like specific URLs or domains. This list is compiled by dedicated users and organizations who continuously update it.
Blocking requests: Every time you visit a webpage, it sends out requests to fetch the content of the page. Each request URL is checked against the adblocker’s list. If it matches an entry on the list, the adblocker stops the request, so the ad never reaches your browser.
Page element hiding: In addition to blocking sources of ads, many adblockers can also hide elements of a webpage that are often used to display ads.
As for your second question, yes, there are adblockers that work on phones! Here are a few examples:
AdGuard: available for iOS and Android, offers protection against ad tracking.
Blokada: a free and open-source adblocker for Android.
1Blocker: a native adblocker for iOS.
Remember that some websites depend on ad revenue to operate, so it’s good practice to disable your adblocker for sites that rely on ads but don’t misuse them.
Lemmy.ml/c/ps5 is moving to Lemmy.world/c/ps5
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/1934052...
Lemmy.ml/c/ps5 is moving to Lemmy.world/c/ps5
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/1934052...
"ActivityPub not suitable for implementation as the base federation layer in diaspora" (overengineer.dev)
What are you thoughts about this?
Why is serveral instances down simultaneously? Is it just me?
Can’t post images because they’re too big so here’s imgur: imgur.com/a/Fm52ZTB...
Is there really no viable alternative for Photoshop on Linux?
I’m starting this off by saying that I’m looking for any type of reasonably advanced photo manipulation tool, that runs natively under Linux. It doesn’t have to be FOSS....
Moving AI governance forward (openai.com)
OpenAI and other leading labs reinforce AI safety, security and trustworthiness through voluntary commitments.
What Happened to lemmy.fmhy.ml? What Happens if an Instance Disappears?
What Happened to lemmy.fmhy.ml? What Happens if an Instance Disappears?...
lemmy.fmhy.ml is gone [update from the team] (very.bignutty.xyz)
An update:...
/c/café daily chat thread for 21 July 2023
How many Lemmy users are non-technical background?
I think most all of us here on Lemmy are people with technical background. Most of my professional contacts remained using Reddit, Twitter and even excited when Threads launched....