this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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Afaik mastodon has a way for instances to migrate to a new domain, but the old domain must be up during the migration process. Lemmy on the other hand don't even have any domain migration procedure yet. People will probably go nuts about this on their GitHub issues portal.
Possibly. I think mastadon has been around a bit longer though? Not sure why the old domain must be up. Unless they don't store public keys of known instances and they rely on DNS for the security.
e.g. Instance A signs a request, Instance B queries Instance A via DNS lookup (as is normal) and checks public key confirms signature and allows it.
I got curious so I start digging into how mastodon do it. It's more like a hack, really. Mastodon uses WebFinger to resolve user account, so when you change domain, you can leave the old domain up so your federated servers can still resolve your users and realized the domain has been changed and update their federation data. But it turns out you can't exactly retire the old domain either because it's still tied to user account internally. So if you lose control of your old domain, you're probably as screwed as fmhy.ml.
Yeah, which is why I think storing remote user and instance public keys might be better. Then that can be used to authenticate the migration request (it'd probably need to be an extension to the activitypub standard).
The biggest problem I see is that an instance doesn't know about all the instances that have data pointing to them. So how does it communicate the changes to everyone? The mastadon way is probably the sensible way to do it, despite not supporting the loss of control of domain scenario.