Dodecahedron December

I try things on the internet.

rarely, shit just works.

  • 0 Posts
  • 27 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: July 5th, 2023
  • Dodecahedron December@sh.itjust.workstoFediverse@lemmy.world•So why is .ml TLD going back to Mali taking everyone by surprise?English
    201·
    1 year ago

    You mean the country that owns and has always owned .ml TLD, which states rules you must follow if you want to register a domain with that TLD, which states the penalties which include forfiet of your domain name, surpised people when they did what they said they would do?

    This is kind of interesting to see how the public views ownership. There seems to be an assumption that buying xyz.com is akin to buying a utility (we pay for water service to drink and drown or waterboard). This ain’t it. A domain name is a registration in a database on servers that need to be constantly online, it had costs, it has governance concerns and technical infrastructure that must be maintained. There isn’t a higher power here, no government owns the internet, but some governments do own their own TLDs. This makes it possible to have mali.ml vs visitbeautifulmali420.squarespace.com. It might feel like you have the power to buy fuckmali.ml and put turn it into goatse but mali can nuke your registration if they wanted to. How did these countries get the TLDs? ICANN. But don’t think ICANN is going to jump in and break their rules for you.

    This sucks but ICANN has a solution… there are many many TLDs out there now. They all work the same: it’s just a name, point it where you go and it works like any .com or .org. or whatever. Fun ones like .zip and .xxx. grab one you like but be sure to read the rules when registering. Some TLDs do NOT allow private registration. Most country based TLDs (ccTLDs) require that you live in that country and provide proof of citizenship.

    This has been around since the inception of the internet. There are alternatives to ICANN, but I am not positive you will want to use them because:

    • your visitors will need to use these alternatives on all devices or on the router in order to access your site.
    • legit domain holders may not have records on these alternate services but malicious actors might. If we change the IP to a malicious actor for apple servers at the DNS level because the TLDs arent using the root-servers.net, anyone using those TLD root servers could easily be hacked.

    It’s not great, but ICANN starts the chain of trust upon which the internet relies.

  • Dodecahedron December@sh.itjust.workstoNonCredibleDefense@sh.itjust.works•Meta: /r/NCD mods say we're moving to the NCD on lemmy.world.English
    61·
    1 year ago

    Ok, consider matrix which is federated e2e chat. There are a few instances but the “dominant one” is matrix.org, the public test instance setup by the matrix devs. You probably do not want to use this one unless you absolutely have to. The reason being is that the instance is so large that chats take a while to load and sync and there can be some downtime as the servers are overloaded lots.

    You can instead run your own little instance with no sign ups, just you, and still chat to everyone on matrix.org as well as the other federated matrix instances. Bonus, when matrix.org goes down, you can still chat with users on your instance and other federated matrix instances instead of waiting for matrix.org, your chosen, “dominant” instance to come back online.

    This is a mental trap folks get into. Centralized services suck and are antithetical to the web’s design.

    Think of these federated instances like email and ask the same question: “which will be the dominant email service? Gmail? Fastmail? Aol? Protonmail?” The answer is you choose the one you want for the reasons you want, and don’t sweat it because it will likely communicate across the rest of the internet (unless blocked by spam filters).

    Things to consider in an instance:

    • do I like the end result of my handle (e.g. rarely@sh.itjust.works vs someone1235@lemmy.ml)?
    • does the instances values somewhat align with mine? I mean to say if you consider joining threads as your fediverse instance, you mind find less content or a worse interaction with content in general? If you join a right wing server as a leftist, you might find the only content you can access is content you don’t want to see, as other instances have blocked that instance…
    • think they will be around for a while? Think again! All of lemmy instances are run by volunteers. If you don’t mind instance hopping when one goes down, just pick one. Guessing which instance will have the resources to continue in years time isn’t something you’re going to get a good feel for years to come. Lemmy content isn’t going to easily monetized meaning likely most instances will need to rely on donations in some form to pay the datacenters who literally keep the lights on.