Bear in mind this was two years ago. Lemmy was small back then. I can understand someone not being able to justify the price of a domain name at that scale.
Getting a .com or .net is on the order of 20 $USD per year. Having a state attempt to claim the name is an uncommon thing (compare having a state’s domain registry be transfered to another agency or expire). Consider how long megaupload ran under a dot com name while flagrantly violating copyright laws.
The registrar that .ml uses also managed .tk and has had many allegations of hosting malicious sites ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.tk#Abuse ) and is in the process of falling apart ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34194555 ). This should have been a warning back in June when the .ga domain by the same registry was lost (and the lawsuit against the registrar back in March).
Freenom is in hot water right now. New registrations have been disabled since March, primarily due to a law suit from Meta. The company is also under investigation by the Court of Amsterdam since late last year due to a dispute with an investor, and in general doesn’t appear to have been profitable since 2016. Meanwhile, the contracts for many of the domain extensions they manage are coming up, and it is possible that Freenom may lose control of other extensions (like .ml, .cf and .gq) as well, which may result in free domains getting deleted.
Therefore, we recommend that everyone who currently is using a Freenom domain should prepare for the event that domains with their other extensions may be lost as well.
For funding, Lemmy has been funded by grants from NLNet for the past several years ( https://lemmy.ml/comment/479066 ) sufficient enough to pay for the two devs to work on it full time.
I find it not entirely credible that .ml was chosen because it was free. Maybe because they were able to get a nice name there, but that’s possible on other domains too.
In the meantime, other sites with .ml domains should probably start working on a migration path sooner than later as it would be easier to do the migration when both ends of the migration are trusted rather than trying to cold start.
Bear in mind this was two years ago. Lemmy was small back then. I can understand someone not being able to justify the price of a domain name at that scale.
Getting a .com or .net is on the order of 20 $USD per year. Having a state attempt to claim the name is an uncommon thing (compare having a state’s domain registry be transfered to another agency or expire). Consider how long megaupload ran under a dot com name while flagrantly violating copyright laws.
The registrar that .ml uses also managed .tk and has had many allegations of hosting malicious sites ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.tk#Abuse ) and is in the process of falling apart ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34194555 ). This should have been a warning back in June when the .ga domain by the same registry was lost (and the lawsuit against the registrar back in March).
https://forum.infinityfree.net/t/all-freenom-ga-domains-are-taken-down-by-registry/77131
For funding, Lemmy has been funded by grants from NLNet for the past several years ( https://lemmy.ml/comment/479066 ) sufficient enough to pay for the two devs to work on it full time.
I find it not entirely credible that .ml was chosen because it was free. Maybe because they were able to get a nice name there, but that’s possible on other domains too.
In the meantime, other sites with .ml domains should probably start working on a migration path sooner than later as it would be easier to do the migration when both ends of the migration are trusted rather than trying to cold start.