this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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Good thing join-lemmy is safely tucked away in a .org domain.
This is extremely bad timing for Lemmy (if it ends up happening), but also a good example of how federation makes the entire social media landscape more robust. Had this happened to a centralized service it would be devastating.
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!
I'm now wondering what happens if the Mali government (or someone else) begins using those domains with their own lemmy instance, potentially with malicious content.
Would the instances they've federated with begin ingesting and serving that content automatically? Or would that be blocked due to key mismatch?
Afaik it is all connected to the domain name, so they could definitely start to impersonate any .ml instance. Other instances could detect that the signing key for federation messages changed, but that's about it. Their admins would probably have to block/defederate them manually.
I think they need the private key for the https certificate to do that
If it was always going to happen, now isn't really a bad time. Sure, a month ago would have been better, but people still haven't been here that long. If I wind up needing to migrate, and lose my current account, oh well. No big loss. I imagine others feel similar.
I was frustrated with the outage yesterday and created a new account on a different instance so I could still browse. Couple hours later I had all my subscriptions filled out and the experience is almost identical to my first account.