holy crap: mastodon server does not support domain name changes. 😆
i now have to give some serious thought to migrating dialup.cafe -> dialup.party
it would mean setting up a new server from scratch, migrating users to the new server, and losing all of their post history in the process. i am truly dumbfounded at how bad this architecture is.
Oct 1, 2025, 4:51 PM@vga256 damn, this is nuts!
@Tijn i have read dozens of posts/feature requests and they all appear to say the same thing: change the primary web domain, and your instance is hosed. there appear to be no workarounds.
@Tijn It's not nuts; it's just how the internet is designed.
First, the proposal is to 'change the mailing address without redirecting mail'. Imagine the postal service trying to forward hundreds of thousands of dailup's daily mail to a place it doesn't know.
"But I can inform ALL the people who mail me!" Now tens of thousands of senders must update *all* the data in their databases just for dialup?
Having a unique TLD has upsides & downsides. The diff between cafe and party is $13. Keep it.
@vga256 The architecture of the web is what limits it. If you change the domain, what happens to any posts or sites that linked to the original URLs? Those can’t be updated, so they become dead links (unless you set up URL redirects from the old domain). Servers across the Fediverse also cache your posts, and those caches include the URLs to your posts, so they’d either have to be told to update or they become dead links. It’s not an easy problem to solve.
@vga256 This is also why migrating your posts from one account to another is prohibitively difficult. None of the links would be updated, so they’d all break.
Oct 1, 2025, 5:14 PM@vga256 Can't you transfer the domain to another, less expensive registrar? The cheapest registrar I know makes the .cafe domains for about 50€ per year.
Oct 1, 2025, 5:28 PM@vga256 hackers.town did some kind of a change - maybe someone there has a word for the wise