this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2024
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Lots of dead Lemmy/Kbin domains have CNAME records pointing to the same domain parking company (lemmy.pierre-couy.fr)
submitted 3 months ago by pcouy@lemmy.pierre-couy.fr to c/fediverse@lemmy.ml
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publication croisée depuis : https://lemmy.pierre-couy.fr/post/584644

While monitoring my Pi-Hole logs today, I noticed a bunch of queries for XXXXXX.bodis.com, where XXXXXX are numbers. I saw a few variations for the numbers, each one being queried several times.

Digging further, I found out these queries were caused by CNAME records on domains that look like they used to point to Lemmy/Kbin instances.

From what I understand, domain owners can register a CNAME record to XXXXXX.bodis.com and earn some money from the traffic it receives. I guess that each number variation is a domain owner ID in Bodis' database. I saw between 5 to 10 different number variations, each one being pointed to by a bunch of old Lemmy domains.

This probably means that among actors who snatch expired domains, several of them have taken a specific interest with expired domains of old Lemmy instances. Another hypothesis is that there were a lot of domains registered for hosting Lemmy during the Reddit API debacle (about 1 year ago), which started expiring recently.

Are there any other instance admins who noticed the same thing ? Is any of my two hypothesis more plausible than the other ? Should we worry about this trend ?

Anyway, I hope this at least serves as a reminder to not let our domains expire ;)

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[–] 2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I would hope there's some kind of key signing mechanism to prove it's the same instance and not just someone else who's running another on the same domain.

[–] qaz@lemmy.world 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It seems like that is part of ActivityPub and Lemmy implements it.

[–] pcouy@lemmy.pierre-couy.fr 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for the details ! Still curious to know how a new instance, with an old domain and fresh keys, would be handled by other instances.

[–] qaz@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Yeah, I first thought it was optional and was pleasently surprised when I found out Lemmy implements it, but I'm not quite sure if other software properly implement it either.