Welp that answers a lot of why all .ml are down

BarterClub@sh.itjust.works to Technology@lemmy.world – 1468 points –
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With ActivityPub all of the primary ids contain the domain of the hosting server. So if you lose your domain none of the other instances know that you're the authority on those communities, posts, comments or users. So essentially federation breaks with all of the old data.

That seems really dumb given the technical aspects as well as the purpose of domains.

Same issue is why mastodon needs your origin server to be online to migrate to a new server. In both cases, federating a public key for the server or accounts would allow either to pop up at a new domain and prove it has the authority to migrate links to the new location.