this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2024
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OP, this title is stupidly misleading and incorrect, you should change it immediately.
The Taliban seized the DOMAIN, aka the ownership of the
queer.afname that people could type into their browsers, and their system would resolve into an IP address.As the Taliban control
Afghanistan, (see where the domain comes from), this was inevitable and the instance owners were already planning to retire the instance as they didn't want to give money to the Taliban to keep it up.The INSTANCE, aka the physical server, was not in Afghanistan, and still has its IP address(es), and so has had absolutely nothing happen to it.
Unfortunately, I think due to the way ActivityPub works, the domain name is inexorably tied to the instance. Trying to migrate to a new domain name would break a lot of federation to my understanding.
It looks like someone posted an attempt at a workaround here (latest reply): https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/5774
But it does require the
self-destructbutton because the old domain name has to be erased from other servers.Does federation involve some sort of key exchange? If not, would that mean that if one loses control of a domain somebody could spin up a new Lemmy instance to spoof the old one and potentially harvest data?
Not in ActivityPub no.
The main privacy/security issue is mostly mitigated by the fact that there's a sync behavior for accounts and follows and distribution of content where the host can push revocation messages, triggering other servers to delete follows and wipe cached account data originating from that hosting server, which means that somebody who takes over a domain after a wipe can't imitate the exact same accounts. But old links can still be redirected because there's no way to verify what they were supposed to point to, so some degree of impersonation remains possible unless other servers agree to preemptively defederate...