A conspiracy by whom? To do what?

Top level domains are a significant source of revenue. As the ".ml" gets used more often due to "machine learning" of course the government will try and explore this further.

A conspiracy to do what? Take down Lemmy? I swear people here overstate our importance. This is a comparatively tiny website.

Wasn't the contract ending causing the domain control to transfer to Mali known for quite a while?

They aren't "reclaiming" the top level domain, they've always owned it. They are simply not renewing the contract which was ending with Freenom.

ml was managed by freenom for a long time. They made it available alongside tk domains.

Freenom stopped operations for sometime and both Mali and Tokelau are in the process of taking over their registrars from freenom.

It’s more of an example of a coincidence than a conspiracy.

I don’t think it’s about lemmy.

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2023/07/17/sensitive-us-military-info-exposed-in-accidental-emails-to-mali/

I can't imagine why. As much as I love the fediverse and what it stands for, it's barely a blip on anyone's radar at this point.

Occam's Razor bud. Learn it and use it, it'll save you a lot of stress.

Buddy you overestimate the importance of lemmy i'm afraid

No, that's just the consequence of choosing a cheap domain name.

• A company somehow secured a contract with Mali government to manage .ml TLD
• Said company then offer free .ml domain registration, with a catch (the domain is not actually yours). They also sell the domain and if you pay for it, the domain will be really yours contractually.
• The contract between the company and Mali government came to an end, and the control of .ml TLD has been transferred back to Mali government
• Mali government decided they want all those free domains back and did just that. Those domains will likely available for sale again later on.
• why Lemmy.ml is not affected? I'm not sure. Does Lemmy.ml use the free domain service, or actually paid for the domain? Or does it survive simply because it has absurdly long TTL on it's DNS entries?

If there was a conspiracy, then it would be because of the military mails thing that went public a few days ago. It's not, the switch was to be expected, but still. They're not after stupid Lemmy, if anything, they are after military secrets

sigh, no its not a conspiracy. Lemmy is just a little speck on the internet right now.

What is it good for to own it, when they're not even able to operate it? :P