I recently was gifted a raspberry pi 5 and was looking at domains to buy to host my own instance. What happens to my instance if the domain expires?

Also, do freenom and .tk just not allow new domains to be registered anymore?

  • redcalcium@lemmy.instituteEnglish
    4·
    10 months ago

    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.

    • Russ@bitforged.spaceEnglish
      4·
      10 months ago

      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.