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What happens to my instance if my domain expires?
(sh.itjust.works)
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this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2023
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I don't think you can change your lemmy instance's domain yet. Afaik there is no official way to do it. FMHY lost their domain (they are using a free domain and lost it) and was attempting to switch to a new domain for their instance and developing a tool to migrate to a new domain, but somehow decided to start fresh and discard their old data instead. No idea what happen with the migration tool they were working on (is it actually working? did they actually released the code?), so save yourself some headache and make sure to never lost your domain, which means don't use free domain because that domain isn't actually yours and can be yanked without any notice.
Yeah, AFAIK ActivityPub itself heavily relies on the domain being part of your identity - so its not really possible to change the domain on any of them, along with other federation implementations such as Matrix.
This is why while Mastodon allows for profile transfers, it doesn't transfer your post content - it simply just sends a signal to your followers to unfollow your old account and follow your new one. The actual content itself is intrinsically tied to your identity on the old domain.
That seems like an oversight. ActivityPub should rely on some sort of certificate or cryptographic signature instead of a domain which might have to occasionally change.
ActivityPub does use cryptographic keys for Actors ("users" in this case) - so even in theory if you were to destroy your instance and then set it up on the same domain and recreate the user, things would be quite broken still... But unfortunately it still does rely on the domain name itself, so I agree.
I think the problem is, without the domain name, there is no way for you to lookup who
@russjr08would be, or where to send data to them. The domain effectively acts as a mailing address (a well suited analogy considering that ActivityPub also uses inboxes/outboxes) so that Instance A always knows that User B can be found on Instance B.I doubt its an impossible challenge to solve, but probably quite a difficult one I'm sure.