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?

  • @[email protected]English
    1•1 year ago

    or some extreme law enforcement action happening to them, although I can’t imagine what for.

    They defederated from buggit.moe just a day before shutting down because it hosted material illegal in Ireland.

    I subbed to so many communities on that… I wonder if it’s possible to recover them at this point

    • delendumOPMEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      Sadly unless it comes back online, there’s not much that can be done outside of those communities setting up shop elsewhere.