This will take place ~24 hours from now. Feel free to post and upvote questions beforehand in this post, as it will turn into the AMA tomorrow.
This is a chance for any users, admins, or developers to ask anything they’d like to myself, @nutomic@lemmy.ml , @SleeplessOne1917@lemmy.ml , or @phiresky@lemmy.ml about Lemmy, its future, and wider issues about the social media landscape today.
What happened with the domain Lemmy.ml when Mali took back controls over its domains and some sites went offline? Are you confident that the .ml domain will be reliable in the future?
We’re paid up on our current registrar for a few more years, but I honestly don’t know how much that can be trusted. Its pretty difficult to get clear information on which ones are safe, and which ones aren’t.
If lemmy.ml goes down, it will be a major annoyance as we migrate domains, and will likely have a day or two of downtime. We do daily DB backups, and have our pictures backed up locally as well, so a full restore is possible, but federation would definitely have issues, and would probably need to do a lot of re-subscribes. Overall tho, it wouldn’t destroy the lemmy project or anything, and if people migrate to smaller servers in the process, that would give us a lot more time to code 😄 .
I apologize for that tho , it was something I didn’t forsee and wasn’t even thought of many years ago when I registered.
I’d be very curious how you guys migrate to a new domain if you ever need to, maybe there will be an open source tool to help with it, and maybe some improvements inside Lemmy’s code, like api calls from both domains to initiate the migration
There’s some instructions here, but I haven’t tested them recently: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/backup_and_restore.html?highlight=backup#backup-and-restore-guide
We might be able to make something inside lemmy’s code that could do a lot of that for you, but someone would need to open an issue and work on it.
I meant stuff like other instances updating your domain name for all its users/communities, fixing their subscriptions and stuff
Have you considered migrating while you still have control of the domain? You could at least make the domain redirect in that case. Though not sure if federation could somehow pick up that lemmy.ml has moved elsewhere.
Seems a bit too risky, because there’s always the possibility that our current registrar will be fine, and just make whatever agreements they want with Mali’s government.
I recommend lemmy.su for obvious reasons if that ever happens lol