Domain in peril

It looks like this domain is in peril.

The Russian government has made a law that you have to be identified via Госуслуги to be able to manage a domain in the ".ru" zone. Well, guess what, it's two weeks before the deadline, and I'm not up-to-date on this.

I have a working Госуслуги account. I could tie it to my registrar. There's just one hitch. The domain registrar still has my deadname on file and they don't seem to want to update it. And I can't bind my Госуслуги to a domain which isn't registered "in my name" (meaning the data has to match).

Well, partially this is on me, I guess, I should've been more proactive in managing my domain owner info. But can you blame a girl for only learning about all this around July? And it all worked just fine before, the registrar for whatever reason didn't even care that the passport on file was expired, like, five renewal terms ago.

But now the form that updates one's owner data is silently eating my documents with zero feedback and I feel like I'll have to message support (which I did) and wait for their reply.

I guess the 14-year old me made a mistake when trusting my country with something so precious. And now I am paying the price for her lapse in judgement (but how could she have known?!)

What do I stand to lose?

Thankfully, the domain's not gonna be cancelled, but if I don't manage to update all of the data and bind the Госуслуги account in time, I may not able to renew it when winter comes. And this means I lose the domain in around 5 months. Let's try to enumerate what will be impacted:

E-mail

Thankfully, my email is self-hosted. My archives are going to be fine. But the ability to receive email may be compromised as a result. And when some services don't allow changing your email address, because somebody had a bright idea of using email as primary key, that might be a problem.

I'll need to compile a list of services I've ever registered on and see if any of them could accept an alternative email address.

Oh, and I'll have to put MX records on my other domain, probably. I think I could just route them to the same underlying mail server; Reverse-DNS could throw a spanner in the works, but surely one could work around that?… I'll need more research on this topic.

Blog permalinks

I've been linked around the web. I'm no celebrity, but I think there could be a few dozen permalinks on the Internet that will inevitably break if I have to move domains. Some of them are on publicly-editable websites, and I could update them; some of them are not and the website owners will have to put in the work.

Hopefully my website was crawled by the Web Archive? I'll need to test that~ I don't think I ever put on a robots.txt on the apex, so there should be nothing preventing archive.org from crawling my permalinks.

IndieAuth

This domain is my IndieAuth identity. And while the website itself will be forever preserved (and could move to another domain if needed), I'm not sure how IndieAuth consumers might handle my me value changing.

I planned to do roughly the following:

• Migrate my blog to another domain
• Put an IndieAuth shim onto this domain that redirects to the new location of my blog
• Try logging in around the web (mostly the IndieAuth wiki)
• Seeing if initiating the ceremony with https://fireburn.ru/ and ending it with me="https://vikanezrimaya.xyz/" is gonna be handled correctly

The answer to the last bullet point: probably not. As far as I understand (and I've written two or three IndieAuth implementations from scratch, so I know a thing or two about the protocol), the domain is the root of identity, and a different me value is a different user entirely. This is how someone on a multi-identity website could log in with the root of their website and get to an identity selector that would allow them to choose the hat to wear for this sign-in. Every single persona is a different IndieAuth identity, because it's a different URL. And I don't know if any software would interpret something like a 301 redirect from a me value as a sign that it will need to be replaced — after all, somebody could be using me as the primary key (see the "E-mail" section above!).

Memories

Well, those will remain. As long as the archives have crawled my blog. As long as I live. But it's still gonna be sad to lose such a memento — a domain I owned almost since the day I gained a semblance of legal personhood in form of a passport and a bank card.

I even messaged the support of my registrar back in the day, asking if one needed to be of age to register the domain. "No", they said, "having a passport and a valid payment method are the only requirements". It was a small window into the world for me — a place of my own.

I don't want to lose it. 😭

Afterword

If anything happens. If this page disappears from the internet. Look for me at vikanezrimaya.xyz — I promise I'll try hard not to lose that one.

I'll make sure this page is crawled by the Archive as soon as I post it, so this forever remains in history even if the domain were to be lost.