I’m posting this in selfhosted because Gandi increasing prices actually helped me a lot with being more serious about selfhosting, made me look into things like DNS and reverse proxies and VPN and docker and also ended up saving me money by re-evaluating my service needs....
Posting something on a website does not make it public domain. Typically, the website's Terms of Service will require that you grant the website operator a license to use any content that you post on the site (so that they can display it to other users). That license does not extend to other visitors of the same website.
Of course, in practice, it's very unlikely that someone would take you to court over copying a website comment. But if someone posts, say, an original work of art or a short story in a comment thread, you should be aware that it is still protected by copyright.
As Bluesky begins to open up more and more, it’s felt more pertinent to try to wrap my head around it. To help in this, I decided to write out my rough understanding of it from its documentation, in the hopes that it may help others and myself with any corrections from misunderstandings....
ack. it just seems like so much control is retained by those big relays/entities.
the single benefit to end users (that end users are aware of) is the data portability... but if its not portable out of the box, ie, no domain name required, those people are gunna freak.
whole endeavor (blueksy using AT) smells like suuuuuunk cost fallacy
“Inherently” means essentially “no matter how you do it”. If you use an encrypted email provider to send a message to another user on another encrypted email provider, it’s perfectly secure. Ergo, it’s not “inherent”.
Full E2E encryption was only implemented recently by certain providers within their own domains
It definitely works across domains. All you have to do is point your domain at your preferred secure email provider.
They tracked users by sending every domain to their servers even though using dumb badness enumeration (possible via a quickly updated local blocklist).
Google confirms Gmail is “here to stay” amid speculation over plans to scrap the email service::Claims that Google plans to sunset Gmail were a hoax, so there’s no need to panic
It’s a weird problem actually. There are valid reasons for blacklisting and whitelisting free email providers.
Some sites only allow registrations from private domains. They blacklist all the free email providers, which makes sure that mostly businesses, academics, etc. are signing up for their services, rather than randos who may have little to no value as a user.
However, some sites see the randos as the only valuable users, and sometimes see private domains as a threat since a bad actor could use one to spawn an infinite number of valid email addresses for registering accounts. Free providers make it much harder to create a new address, so they whitelist them.
Proton is way too overpriced for older accounts with a lot of stuff accumulated and encryption is a gimmick unless you’re only communicating with other Proton users. All companies encrypt email at rest.
I’m currently using and can definitely recommend purely mail. Obviously backup, but so far the service has been excellent. It’s the only fairly priced service out there for personal hosting that supports custom domains.
Given how Reddit now makes money by selling its data to AI companies, I was wondering how the situation is for the fediverse. Typically you can block AI crawlers using robot.txt (Verge reported about it recently: https://www.theverge.com/24067997/robots-txt-ai-text-file-web-crawlers-spiders). But this only works per...
Thanks for confirming. It's unfortunate that people who are outraged about Reddit selling their data to AI companies don't really have an alternative in the fediverse.
I guess the best hope is for new mechanisms to control AI crawlers to emerge, so they can be blocked per user rather than per domain. Maybe https://spawning.ai will come up with something. One can hope.
The TOS shouldn’t hold up in court. A contract must be an exchange of two things, eg money for a product or service. You can’t say “Our service is free of charge!!!” And then in the fine print “(((But also you agree to give us everything we can take free of charge)))”.
The issue is how everyone does it. Facebook and Google started when data had no value, now they’re amongst the wealthiest businesses in the world. Now, Microsoft have joined in, *even though you already pay for their products and services anyway!"
However, the other aspect is that everyone is a victim. Lawmakers are the victim. They still haven’t quite yet realised how much is being taken from them (at least $50 per year, probably more like $1,000 per year if not more for prominent figures) but they are still being abused.
It’s like that form of bank fraud, where the criminal takes pennies from accounts, hoping the user won’t notice and the bank will write it off. Do it to enough people and enough times and you can make millions. They do this to everyone and they make billions.
Either the data is public domain and they don’t have to pay for it, but also cannot charge others for it, or the data is private and they must pay the author a fair share.
I'm a fan of the Fediverse, but what are the major issues we faced right now because of the limitations of the #ActivityPub protocol? Recently, decentralize social networks are at their peak, big players are trying to be part of it, and is constantly in the news....
The account ownership one is definitely my first thought too. Using keypairs to identify accounts controlled by the user would be great. You can hide it behind a normal looking username with your (or a third party’s) domain on both Nostr and AT (though AT’s not fully developed, but it’s totally in control of the user and doing that with activity pub could hand the metaphorical keys of your account to you instead of the server. Another way would be to allow users to use their own domain with an existing third party server, or use something similar to Zot’s (Hubzilla) “Nomadic Identities” that let you mirror your account on another server.
Implementing quote posts is a little above my pay grade, but I actually think that the link option might be a great idea. Nostr does quote posts by just embedding the post into your post where the nevent is pasted in, making both regular quote posts and the general ability to embed any post anywhere in your post. That sort of functionality, just using links to posts instead of nevents could be neat to standardize into activity pub as well, especially if all the other activity pub software already is doing that. Though again, not exactly a dev, so who knows if that’d break things.
Just to be clear, what I’m referring to here is that a search would occur on a single instance. E.g. searches on lemmy.world occur on the lemmy.world instance, and load lemmy.world’s servers. The federated part is in the building the database on lemmy.world. E.g. a crawler or a user on lemmy.ca adds a new web site and that record is federated to lemmy.world to add to its database. Another user on feddit.de upvotes a search result and that upvote is federated to lemmy.world so that the search result shows higher for users searching on lemmy.world. In this kind of model individual search instances could in fact be very large based on their usage. If there’s no limit to what’s federated, that would put a lower bound on the size of instances. If there’s a limit (something dumb like federate only search records for *.fr domains) then that would allow for smaller instances that don’t have the compute and storage for the complete index.
I do actually have a NextCloud instance, which I primarily use for editing Documents (via Collabora) or syncing backups of folders like Pictures etc from the phone.
SMB/Samba by itself for just sharing folders I’ve had little issue with. Samba as a domain controller with domain-joined clients tied to domain logins is a more complicated beast and - in my experience -prone to breakage in my experience (expired tokens, certificate lifetimes, DNS integration, upgrade issues, etc) BUT it can provide a fairly complete package end-to-end when it works. I just feel that there should be a more Linux-centric/friendly and less bloaty solution that still others decent account-level security.
When you ask “only on LAN” the answer is yes with the caveat that I do also work through VPN, but that’s often functionally the same thing save that the VPN login occurs after the user-login
Lemmy and the fediverse is the opposite of privacy. Everything you do (as in: post, comment, like, follow, subscribe, block) is being recorded and shared with everyone. There is no need to sell data, because it is already public domain.
In this way Lemmy is waaay worse for the users privacy than Reddit.
It’s called home realm discovery. It’s common in business apps though it’s usually used with email & password logins not username & password logins.
It’s done that way to support federated logins. Larger companies will often used a single sign on solution like Okta or Azure AD. Once the user’s email address is entered it checks the domain against a list of sign on providers for each domain and redirects the user to their company’s federated login if it finds it there instead of prompting for a password.
This has several benefits:
The user doesn’t have mutiple passwords to remember for different apps. Which is know to result in users either reusing passwords or writing down passwords somewhere.
When an employee quits or is terminated the company only needs to disable their account in their company directory and not go into potential dozens of separate web apps to disable accounts.
The software vendor never receives the password, if the vendor’s system is compromised they don’t even have password hashes to leak. (Let alone plain text or reversibly encrypted passwords)
Websites that work that way are (usually) doing it right. If that doesn’t work with your password manager, you should (probably) blame the password manager not the website.
I was just scrolling through the megathread for untrusted websites and saw that yts.mx was untrusted? I’ve been using that website for YEARS. Am I fucked? I did a quick search in this community and saw posts mostly recommending the site, so does anyone know what’s going on? The reason listen for it’s untrustworthiness is...
TorrentFreak has some good articles on it but here are some highlights
The site, which is connected to the people who hijacked EZTV earlier this year, want the public to believe that they are the real YTS. They misleadingly use the name of a member of the real YTS team, for example, and suggest that YTS simply decided to move to a new domain.
In order to survive, YTS had to hand over some user details, while promising to pay over $1 million in piracy damages, on paper. In addition, the notorious torrent site agreed to remove torrents linking to the movie companies’ content and prevent them from being reuploaded.
This unprecedented deal caused quite the stir when YTS user data was put to work in other lawsuits against individual file sharers and Internet providers. In a very pragmatic sense, the settlement was a great deal for the movie companies. At least, for as long as it lasted.
3rd party cookies make tracking users easier when the same cookie can be used on many websites.
Firefox does 2 things to protect you from that: it blocks known trackers cookies by default; and for the others it isolates them per domain so that kind of tracking doesn’t happen. That ensures you’re not tracked and at the same time it doesn’t break any functionality.
Okay, let me start by saying that I really do love Home Assistant. I believe that it is a fantastic piece of software, with very dedicated developers that are far more talented than I. Although, that being said, I strongly disagree with a number of their design choices....
I can’t grasp your use case I feel, pretty much all your complaints seem… odd. To me at least.
First subdomain. I think HA is completely right that proxy with a subpath is basically an anti-pattern that just makes things worse for you and is always a bad idea (with very few exceptions).
As for your tunnel I don’t know how you’ve set it up and I haven’t used tailscale but them only allowing one domain sounds like a very arbitrary limit, is it something that costs money to add? I use NetBird which I selfhost on my VPS and from there tunnel into my much beefier home setup.
Then docker in HAOS. The proper way I feel of running HA is for sure HAOS, and also running it in its own VM / or on dedicated hardware. This because you will likely need to couple additional hardware like a stick providing support for more protocols like ZigBee or Matter. It really isn’t a good solution for running all your self hosted stuff, and wasn’t ever intended to be. Running Plex in HA for instance is just a plain bad idea, even if it can be done. As such the need for an external drive seems strange as well. If you need to interact with storage you should set up a NAS and share over SAMBA. All this to say that HA should be one VM/Device, your docker environment another VM.
As for authentication there are 10k plus contributors to Home Assistant yearly but very few bother to make authentication more streamlined. I would’ve loved OpenID/OAuth2 support natively but there are ways to do so with custom components and in the end I quite strongly feel that if the end-users of your smarthome setup (i.e. the wife and kids) need to login to Home Assistant then you’ve probably got more work to do. Remote controls which interact with HA handle the vast majority of manual interaction and I’ve dabbled with self-hosted voice interfaces for the more complex operations.
Sorry if this came across as writing you on the nose, that’s not my intention. I just suspect you’re making things harder for yourself and maybe have a strange idea around how to selfhost in general?
You make some good points, I’ve said a few times now that I mistook Home Assistant add-ons as traditional Docker containers (which I’ve learned the hard way is flat out wrong, you know what they say about assumptions).
First subdomain. I think HA is completely right that proxy with a subpath is basically an anti-pattern that just makes things worse for you and is always a bad idea (with very few exceptions).
I don’t agree with the comment replying about how developers are lazy. That being said, I also wouldn’t call a subpath an anti-pattern, it’s not uncommon and I wouldn’t say that it is always a bad idea (they have some pros and cons on subdomains and it’s what my setup calls for).
As for your tunnel I don’t know how you’ve set it up and I haven’t used tailscale but them only allowing one domain sounds like a very arbitrary limit, is it something that costs money to add? I use NetBird which I selfhost on my VPS and from there tunnel into my much beefier home setup.
There’s an open feature request for subdomains, but it hasn’t really gone anywhere. I’m assuming that it must be how they handle SSL certificates.
As for authentication there are 10k plus contributors to Home Assistant yearly but very few bother to make authentication more streamlined. I would’ve loved OpenID/OAuth2 support natively but there are ways to do so with custom components and in the end I quite strongly feel that if the end-users of your smarthome setup (i.e. the wife and kids) need to login to Home Assistant then you’ve probably got more work to do. Remote controls which interact with HA handle the vast majority of manual interaction and I’ve dabbled with self-hosted voice interfaces for the more complex operations.
Yeah, I’ve seen the idea that Home Assistant shouldn’t be the part you interact with several times, but I don’t really know of any better things to handle this. None of us really love voice controls and I’ve toyed around with Google Home (but I think it’s absolute garbage and self-host to get away from companies like Google).
I just suspect you’re making things harder for yourself and maybe have a strange idea around how to selfhost in general?
Not my ideas that are strange, I’d love to have a traditional setup. I’ve mentioned it a few times in other replies, I just don’t want to be the “just look at my other replies” person, so here’s whats going on: Starlink is my ISP (CGNAT; I can’t port-forward), Tailscale is now my only way of accessing things off of my LAN (I didn’t mind Cloudflare Tunnels, but Cloudflare scares me and Jellyfin is a pretty important thing and supposedly if you want to stream video you’re not allowed/supposed to use Tunnels), my only device is an RPi4 (I’ve tried other devices, but I really love the simplicity of the Pi – and also don’t have many other devices that would work that good for self-hosting).
Again, I’d love to have a “normal” ISP (we live in the middle of no where) that lets me port-forward and is nice and something other than a Pi to host on, but this is what I’m stuck with.
Sorry if this came across as writing you on the nose, that’s not my intention.
It’s all good I get where you’re coming from, and I’m sure you understand what’s going on for me.
Requiring a full URL will be more of security thing I would guess, as some users put HA on the internet and it could have access to open doors.
Also I have tried things on sub paths and it got very complicated to know where a service was, a domain keeps things easy to setup and manage. As I run internet facing services for my day job, I have to look at both security and easy of maintenance when setting things up.
I would say that if you need a path over domain, its a skill issue and you need to find a better way of working.
The top pinned answer has a single line reg command that I used. I assume there are still pieces of it that will just always be around, but at least it’s out of my mind for now.
The GPO method should work similarly, and it’s what I’m going to try as soon as I see it start showing up on my work domain. I say when, not if, because these things have a way of getting around our deployment schedules. I just know one day will get a dm from a user asking if its a virus and I’ll end up finding out a third of the office already loves it.
Migrating away from Gandi, 9 months later
I’m posting this in selfhosted because Gandi increasing prices actually helped me a lot with being more serious about selfhosting, made me look into things like DNS and reverse proxies and VPN and docker and also ended up saving me money by re-evaluating my service needs....
A lot of Redditors hate the Reddit IPO (www.theverge.com)
Attempting to parse Authenticated Transfer Protocol, or Atproto
As Bluesky begins to open up more and more, it’s felt more pertinent to try to wrap my head around it. To help in this, I decided to write out my rough understanding of it from its documentation, in the hopes that it may help others and myself with any corrections from misunderstandings....
Does email (SMTP/POP3) count as a member of the fediverse?
i think it might in theory
Lemmy helping Lemmy World browse the web
I thought it would be helpful for all the good people of Lemmy World if we shared our browser setups....
ATT’s botched network update caused yesterday’s major wireless outage (arstechnica.com)
Google confirms Gmail is “here to stay” amid speculation over plans to scrap the email service (www.itpro.com)
Google confirms Gmail is “here to stay” amid speculation over plans to scrap the email service::Claims that Google plans to sunset Gmail were a hoax, so there’s no need to panic
Blocking AI crawlers on the fediverse (fedia.io)
Given how Reddit now makes money by selling its data to AI companies, I was wondering how the situation is for the fediverse. Typically you can block AI crawlers using robot.txt (Verge reported about it recently: https://www.theverge.com/24067997/robots-txt-ai-text-file-web-crawlers-spiders). But this only works per...
Reddit says it's made $203M so far licensing its data (techcrunch.com)
What are the proposal to make the ActivityPub protocol better? (kbin.social)
I'm a fan of the Fediverse, but what are the major issues we faced right now because of the limitations of the #ActivityPub protocol? Recently, decentralize social networks are at their peak, big players are trying to be part of it, and is constantly in the news....
Phishing credential campaigns via Email Service Providers (ESPs): a dangerous tactic (www.kaspersky.com)
Target: Businesses using Email Service Providers (ESPs) like SendGrid to send email campaigns, and the receivers of the emails...
How Google is killing independent sites like ours - HouseFresh (housefresh.com)
authenticated remote filesystem access for home/SOHO use?
(sorry in advance for the long post)...
deleted_by_moderator
This is painfully true (lemmy.ca)
And no, I will not tell you what my company app is.
YTS.MX untrusted?
I was just scrolling through the megathread for untrusted websites and saw that yts.mx was untrusted? I’ve been using that website for YEARS. Am I fucked? I did a quick search in this community and saw posts mostly recommending the site, so does anyone know what’s going on? The reason listen for it’s untrustworthiness is...
Why has Firefox not removed third-party cookies, despite the fact that Chrome has begun phasing them out?
I love Home Assistant, but...
Okay, let me start by saying that I really do love Home Assistant. I believe that it is a fantastic piece of software, with very dedicated developers that are far more talented than I. Although, that being said, I strongly disagree with a number of their design choices....
Microsoft in their infinite wisdom has replaced the Hide Desktop icon with Copilot. (programming.dev)
Switch to Linux!...