The short of it is:

• vlemmy.net was one of the larger Lemmy instances (>10k users)
• They suddenly went offline today with no warning, all DNS records gone
• Nobody really knows why

There’s more discussion in this thread: https://feddit.nl/post/458654

From what I can tell, this has nothing to do with their domain expiring / them forgetting to pay their domain bill. WHOIS records show it had been registered for many years, and domain registration is paid for in advance:

The domain status appears to have changed. The June 10th 2023 WHOIS data showed it as:

This is what you expect for a domain that is not currently being transferred.

The status now is:

Something is clearly going on with the domain, and it’s not forgetting to pay a bill. All DNS records are gone, so this doesn’t look like an oopsie there either.

I think all of these are possibilities:

1. Owners decided to pull the plug on it
2. This is a bungled attempt to transfer the domain to another registrar
3. Someone managed to break into their registrar account and is trying to transfer the domain away

I think these are unlikely:

1. Legal/law enforcement action
2. Accidentally deleting DNS records

It will be interesting to see how this develops. If vlemmy is truly gone, then this is a significant loss to the Fediverse, as they were the only larger Lemmy instance to have a no defederation policy.

What are your thoughts?