An update:
- fmhy.ml is gone, due to the ongoing fiasco with mali government taking all their .ml domains back
- As such, lemmy.fmhy.ml is also gone, we are currently exploring ways to refederate (or somehow restart federation entirely) without breaking anything substantial
- We have backups, so don’t worry about data loss (you can view them on other instances anyway)
Currently, we have fmhy.net and are exploring options to somehow migrate, thank you for your patience.
I got curious so I start digging into how mastodon do it. It’s more like a hack, really. Mastodon uses WebFinger to resolve user account, so when you change domain, you can leave the old domain up so your federated servers can still resolve your users and realized the domain has been changed and update their federation data. But it turns out you can’t exactly retire the old domain either because it’s still tied to user account internally. So if you lose control of your old domain, you’re probably as screwed as fmhy.ml.