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.

It'll be fun when Tuvalu decides to take back .tv

Is there information about this situation with Mali government about ml domains? I cannot find anything about it.

Though apparently some ml domain receives a lot of accidental US military emails :).

Well, this is just weird. When I was migrating from Reddit to this fediverse world I chose .ml and thought it was short for "machine learning" which seemed as a cool domain for me at the time.

$ whois lemmy.ml
WHOIS lookup for LEMMY.ML can temporarily not be answered. Please try again.
ERROR: domain not found:
$

But it's still in my DNS cache

Sounds like it will if Mali decides to take back .ml as Gabon apparently did for .ga. background here https://domainincite.com/28814-millions-of-domains-to-be-deleted-as-freenom-loses-its-first-tld

Thanks for the image, I didn't know FMHY had an official response, good to know they had backups....unlike me who lives in eternal danger.

On the technical topic of renaming a domain of a Lemmy server... I think it is worth experimenting with the code. At minimum, I think it should be an option to try and keep the same login/passwords for users from the old install of Lemmy. But even that could prove tricky if a particular domain changed underllying ownership more than once - and user@domain became rewritten by an entirely different person. I guess in the real-world people do often get mail for previous residence of a house.

My biggest concern is legality because Lemmy claims to support privacy. I honestly think it's a bad idea to claim privacy because you run into so many problems. If the user never knows that their lemmy instance changed names and can't find it again, etc. Especially on technical topics, 15+ years of having Reddit keep messages from deleted user accounts offered a lot of great search engine hits. With Lemmy, a person moving to a different instance and deleting their account, so much content is going to get black-hole in favor of 50 instances having copies of a meme post or trivial website link - and solid original content (often in comment discussions) gets removed.

Certified Lemmy Moment