I asked this as a comment on my previous post, but I still have some questions. 1: If ML stands for Mali and they’re not from Mali, then why would they represent a foreign country? 2: Since it’s not Mali, what does the ML stand for? If it’s a pair of letters, it represents a country or stands for two words. Machine Learning? McCartney Lennon? Mega Lemmy?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.ml
It’s Mali. Period.
Just because someone registers a domain to host a website from Mali doesn’t mean they represent Mali. Tonga sells domains to anyone with the .to extension, which are used by many torrent sites because Tonga doesn’t care much about respecting piracy laws elsewhere.
You’re reading way too much into it.
I’ve always hated that about DNS, I think it should have been more governed. For example with .gov, well .gov from the first point.
.govshouldn’t be anything really except for like UN or something. It shouldn’t imply US.- US should be
.us.gov, or Australiaau.gov. - Ohio then should be
ohio.us.gov - Akron of course
akron.ohio.us.gov - and then logically all things like if you wanted to email the treasurer of Akron, Ohio it would be
treasurer@akron.ohio.us.gov.
instead we have crazy domains like
akronohio.gov. I mean, just the wild west of domains out here. It could have been so organized, peopleGiven my username, I was naturally very surprised as I read through your example. (Totally agree btw, but that would make too much sense)
Wait really? I swear I didn’t read your username I just randomly picked Akron!
Wild! So devilstrip is what people from Akron call the grass between the road and the sidewalk.
Never knew! That’s so so weird and funny!
Why isn’t there another domain that they could have used so it doesn’t look like they’re from Mali?
Price.
The more common the tld (.com and .net for example are often double the price of many others) the more expensive it is to keep that domain registered.
Why is it top level if it’s so rare?
there is no “rarity” with domain names. They are simply for sale. You can go buy any domain you want if it’s not taken (and unless it’s .gov or .mil, I believe those are restricted)
Top level as in it’s the top/beginning of the domain. (reading right to left separated by periods)
Domains have different parts: subdomain.rootzonedomain.topleveldomain
So using the example: google.com
Google owns the ‘google’ portion of the domain, called the root zone domain. They pay VeriSign Global Registry Services (the owner of the ‘com’ top level domain) to keep the fully qualified domain name ‘google.com’ registered to google inc. Google can then add anything they want to the beginning of the domain such as keep.google.com. These are called sub-domains. They could be part of and used by the company itself or even rented out by google the same way google pays VeriSign for their ‘com’ registration.
For example: No-ip is a service that will freely rent subdomains of their no-ip.com domain, mainly so you can easily reach your self-hosted services without needing to remember your home IP. You could host lemmy.no-ip.com if you wanted to.
The owners of sought after tlds like ‘com’ and ‘net’ set the prices higher than some others as there is more demand. Because of this many self-hosters amd smaller companies just use cheaper tlds like ‘ml’. The extra cost isn’t really worth it.
Great explanation. Thank you.
Why do you care? What does it matter? Who gives a shit?
If I’m asking, then it must mean that I am expressing interest in the topic, am I not?
I do.
Mind if I ask why? I don’t like their political views, but this seems like a non-issue to me unless I’m not understanding something. They’ve never made any claims about living in Mali, and it’s a popular and accepted trend of using domains that are convenient and cheap no matter their location. The only exceptions I believe are .gov and .edu.
Because it’s representing a foreign country. I have a better grasp of it now, but I didn’t understand why they did that.
It means whatever you want it to mean. Go wild!
huh, til. I always thought it was “matrix labs”
It’s the Mali top level domain. The devs were just originally looking for a cheap domain to use.
Though I would expect they purposefully looked for one that let them have a dual-meaning, since the .ml also stands for Marxist-Leninist, as the devs are big Russia, China, and North Korea supporters.
And by “cheap” we mean literally free in some cases.
Mali’s government was letting Freenom manage it. So it was a free domain name like .tk, with all the problems that entails with misuse.
Tagging you @favrion because no one seems to have mentioned this, and I think it answers your question.
How do you know this?
Mali was chosen because the dev team has a lot of communists and ML is often used as a shorthand for Marxism-Leninism. Tangentially related: If you ever see a communists who is strangely enthusiastic about MultiLevelMarketing they are probably talking about Marxism-Leninism-Maoism when they say MLM.
Sorry it took so long for somebody to answer.
It is a cheap tld.
What does TLD stand for?
Top Level Domain, it’s like .com or .net
Top level? I’ve only seen it here, so it’s more like buried at the bottom.
dns lookups ( what turns lemmy.ml into an address your computer can connect to) actually go right to left. first the root servers are asked, then they say go ask the ml servers and g, then they ask the lemmy.ml servers.
in practice, usually unless otherwise configured your isp’s name servers are asked first; if someone else has recently asked for the same site it remembers what the answer was and just gives the same to you.
~ $ dig lemmy.ml @a.root-servers.net ; <<>> DiG 9.18.17 <<>> lemmy.ml @a.root-servers.net ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 194 ;; flags: qr rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 4, ADDITIONAL: 8 ;; WARNING: recursion requested but not available ;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION: ; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 4096 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;lemmy.ml. IN A ;; AUTHORITY SECTION: ml. 172800 IN NS a.nic.ml. ml. 172800 IN NS b.nic.ml. ml. 172800 IN NS d.nic.ml. ml. 172800 IN NS c.nic.ml. ;; ADDITIONAL SECTION: a.nic.ml. 172800 IN A 196.10.220.136 b.nic.ml. 172800 IN A 165.90.218.166 b.nic.ml. 172800 IN AAAA 2c0f:f900:2:3::2 d.nic.ml. 172800 IN A 196.216.168.37 d.nic.ml. 172800 IN AAAA 2001:43f8:120::37 c.nic.ml. 172800 IN A 204.61.216.144 c.nic.ml. 172800 IN AAAA 2001:500:14:6144:ad::1dig lemmy.ml @a.nic.ml ; <<>> DiG 9.18.17 <<>> lemmy.ml @a.nic.ml ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 9343 ;; flags: qr rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 4, ADDITIONAL: 1 ;; WARNING: recursion requested but not available ;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION: ; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 1232 ; COOKIE: 00164cf2465aee8df39824f664cda390738de0ec34953975 (good) ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;lemmy.ml. IN A ;; AUTHORITY SECTION: lemmy.ml. 7200 IN NS ns04.freenom.com. lemmy.ml. 7200 IN NS ns02.freenom.com. lemmy.ml. 7200 IN NS ns03.freenom.com. lemmy.ml. 7200 IN NS ns01.freenom.com.dig lemmy.ml @ns04.freenom.com ; <<>> DiG 9.18.17 <<>> lemmy.ml @ns04.freenom.com ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 49838 ;; flags: qr aa rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 4, ADDITIONAL: 4 ;; WARNING: recursion requested but not available ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;lemmy.ml. IN A ;; ANSWER SECTION: lemmy.ml. 3600 IN A 54.36.178.108 ;; AUTHORITY SECTION: lemmy.ml. 300 IN NS ns01.freenom.com. lemmy.ml. 300 IN NS ns02.freenom.com. lemmy.ml. 300 IN NS ns03.freenom.com. lemmy.ml. 300 IN NS ns04.freenom.com. ;; ADDITIONAL SECTION: ns01.freenom.com. 7200 IN A 54.171.131.39 ns02.freenom.com. 7200 IN A 52.19.156.76 ns03.freenom.com. 7200 IN A 104.155.27.112 ns04.freenom.com. 7200 IN A 104.155.29.241This is very confusing.
anything in particular I can clear up?
blow by blow: first the request for an A record ( ipv4 address) for lemmy.ml is sent to a.root-servers.net ( one of several core name servers to the entire internet)
they don’t reply with an A record, but instead a few NS ( nameserver) records for .ml and then in the additional section also give use the ipv4 and ipv6 addresses to those .ml name servers
so we go ask those .ml servers again for an A record for lemmy.ml, they still don’t give us that A record, but instead say these ns.freenom.com name servers are responsible.
we ask one of them and they finally give us that A record: lemmy.ml is 54.36.178.108 so your computer knows to connect to 54.36.178.108 when you ask for lemmy.ml.
its the first and last two columns that are important. the second column is just how many seconds that information should be considered good for before asking again to make sure it hasn’t changed
🫤 Okay. Thanks.
Top is the highest level, again like .com, .net, then it moves down to lemmy.
ml->lemmy.
com->amazon.
com->google->mail
