Yes that’s what SimpleLogin does and its part of the Proton umbrella. You can use your own custom domain or a SimpleLogin domain to create email addresses. It also enables you to send from the custom addresses so the end user never learns your true email address. SimpleLogin also has mobile apps so you can create addresses very easily.
Every so often i start believing all the posts about how Linux really made a lot of progress, and the desktop experience is so much better now, and everything is supported, and i give it another try....
I mean, I don’t think it’s a shit experience at all. It’s different. If you’re not aware of the strengths, then weaknesses like this are going to turn you off a lot. For me, I would never try to run Windows as my main desktop unless some weird situation came up that really required it, but some of the stuff you’re picking out as issues are real issues, yes.
And the strength you see in linux… ok, WSL in windows is probably a bit less efficient, but for most usages all those windows downsides are now moot with WSL & docker. if i want to install a web server and wordpress, it’s just as easy as any linux server.
I’m such a dickhead that I literally just spun up a totally fresh Debian server just so I could type time apt install apache2 wordpress and can report that it took 46.314 seconds including me starting blankly at package lists for a little bit before hitting enter. Go install a web server and Wordpress on a fresh-installed Windows machine and come back and tell me how long it took and how many steps. The point is not that one literal example – it’s that once you learn how to use it, you’ll be able to work faster and more happily on it than you will on a Windows machine. If you need something in the domain where Linux shines, networking or development, it’ll be as far ahead of Windows as Windows is on things like consumer-hardware support and end-user experience. If you don’t need that, then it’s not relevant to you and its weaknesses will piss you off and of course you won’t like it.
Of course i know the main advantage of linux is no spyware crap, but it’s kind of sad if after all these years that’s pretty much still the only advantage.
This is a very strange statement.
But it seems i’m still not ready for the linux desktop experience, no matter how often it’s repeated on the fediverse here how good it is now…
I mean… maybe those are the same people telling you to download Google Chrome .debs so I’m not sure I would put much stock in their statements. I’ve been hearing for over 20 years that Linux is obviously ready for the desktop, and I’m honestly not really convinced (with experiences like yours as pretty good examples of why).
The EU regularly forces DNS server operators to remove entries or redirect certain domains. It’s super easy to circumvent but most users don’t know that.
A reverse proxy takes all your web-based services, e.g.
plex on port 32400
octoprint on port 8000
transmission on port 8888
and allows you to map these to domain names, so instead of typing server.example.com:32400 you can type plex.example.com. I have simplified this quite a bit though - you need DNS configured as well, and depending on your requirements you may want to purchase a domain name if you intend on accessing content from outside your home without a self hosted VPN.
Cloudflare is a DDoS mitigation service, a caching web proxy, and a DNS nameserver. Most users here would probably be using it for Dynamic DNS. You can use it in combination with a reverse proxy as a means to mask your home IP address from people connecting to your self hosted web-based services remotely, but on its own it cannot be used as a reverse proxy (at least easily - would not recommend attempting to). Do note that Cloudflare can see all the data you transmit through their systems, something to bare in mind if you are privacy conscious.
In my opinion though, it would be much better for you to use a self hosted VPN to access your self hosted services (can be used in combination with the reverse proxy), unless there is a specific need to expose the services out to the internet
Edit: fix minor typo, add extra info about cloudflare
Ok, but if you do this, when comes the time when you try to grow the Fediverse again? Currently, the Fediverse has about 2M users, which are mostly on Mastodon. With the entry of Threads, this percentage will decrease over time. It will weaken or position further. Probably, there will be some companies that will try to compete with threads and if we are lucky, they are nice to us. But on paper, our percentage and our influence will decrease further. When is the point when you turn the switch to growth and claim room in the market?
So no, I don’t see how it could work. I think we are currently in the best position that we will have in the next years and we should use it to our advantage.
Facebook adopting the activity pub protocol does not mean we have to federate with them, and we should be beyond suspicious that they want to federate with us. No good can come of it.
Its pretty clear what they want: they see an emerging market and they want to claim and dominate it like they always do and they want to use us for their growth and they will use that growth for potentially bad things. That’s all to be expected. But as long as they federate nicely with us, we should federate with them too. People will start asking themselves why some users have different domains and when important public figures start posting from the fediverse, word will get around. People thrive for freedom. I would go as far as saying that we have a responsibility here: our presence on Threads shows people the alternative to walled gardens.
And once important public figures have migrated in the Fediverse, temporary defederation will hurt Meta much more. Meta hugely underestimating what happens if the Left has pointed out the Fediverse as their new frontier.
How can all of that happen by just defederating? For me its a form of casting away responsibility.
I meant unique in the size and numbers of users. I think at a certain point, you will lose some beginner-friendliness if you want it to scale.
Dunno if it’s still true or not but I also recall that stuff like Lemmy depends on DNS, meaning you have to be able to buy your own domain and depend on that kind of central authority (wasn’t the point of Fediverse stuff to be decentralized?)
Well, then you could just as well call the web itself not enough dezentralized. The Fediverse just builds on that.
Rather recently a good amount of Lemmy servers were oopsied because one of the .tld authorities pulled the rug from under an entire top-level domain name.
But pii isn't being sent. A user's nickname and the domain of their instance plus any content they create is. If they choose to put their pii in public posts or user info, that's their choice but is not pii solicited in order to operate the service, it was volunteered.
It's a crucial difference. I considered this when writing the terms and data retention information for my own instance. Federation is very frugal about the information shared.
I recently was gifted a raspberry pi 5 and was looking at domains to buy to host my own instance. What happens to my instance if the domain expires?...
When your domain is close to running out, you should either get an email from your registrar asking you to renew, or a payment notification telling you that your domain will be renewed for whatever price automatically.
If the payment fails, the domain will be temporarily suspended. There is a grace period where nobody can buy that domain, allowing you to settle the missed payment. If you do not settle the payment, the domain will be put back up for sale
None of this affects whatever services you’re running on your Pi, people just won’t be able to connect to it if your domain is suspended.
I’d suggest looking into SSL certificates (Letsencrypt is free) as well as Cloudflare for masking your Pi (your home) IP address from users of your instance - do note this has privacy implications: cloudflare becomes a MITM for your site
Freenom is being sued by Meta (Facebook) at the moment for supposedly not dealing with spam domains. I would not recommend using a Freenom domain if/when they reopen registrations: FMHY had their old Freenom lemmy instance domain seized by Mali’s government
ActivityPub does use cryptographic keys for Actors (“users” in this case) - so even in theory if you were to destroy your instance and then set it up on the same domain and recreate the user, things would be quite broken still… But unfortunately it still does rely on the domain name itself, so I agree.
I think the problem is, without the domain name, there is no way for you to lookup who @russjr08 would be, or where to send data to them. The domain effectively acts as a mailing address (a well suited analogy considering that ActivityPub also uses inboxes/outboxes) so that Instance A always knows that User B can be found on Instance B.
I doubt its an impossible challenge to solve, but probably quite a difficult one I’m sure.
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
Digital rights management (DRM) is the management of legal access to digital content. Various tools or technological protection measures (TPM) like access control technologies, can restrict the use of proprietary hardware and copyrighted works. DRM technologies govern the use, modification and distribution of copyrighted works (e.g. software, multimedia content) and of systems that enforce these policies within devices. DRM technologies include licensing agreements and encryption.Laws in many countries criminalize the circumvention of DRM, communication about such circumvention, and the creation and distribution of tools used for such circumvention. Such laws are part of the United States’ Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and the European Union’s Information Society Directive – with the French DADVSI an example of a member state of the European Union implementing that directive.Many users argue that DRM technologies are necessary to protect intellectual property, just as physical locks prevent personal property from theft. For examples, they can help the copyright holders for maintaining artistic controls, and supporting licenses’ modalities such as rentals. Industrial users (i.e. industries) have expanded the use of DRM technologies to various hardware products, such as Keurig’s coffeemakers, Philips’ light bulbs, mobile device power chargers, and John Deere’s tractors. For instance, tractor companies try to prevent farmers from making repairs via DRM.DRM is controversial. There is an absence of evidence about the DRM capability in preventing copyright infringement, some complaints by legitimate customers for caused inconveniences, and a suspicion of stifling innovation and competition. Furthermore, works can become permanently inaccessible if the DRM scheme changes or if a required service is discontinued. DRM technologies have been criticized for restricting individuals from copying or using the content legally, such as by fair use or by making backup copies. DRM is in common use by the entertainment industry (e.g., audio and video publishers). Many online stores such as OverDrive, use DRM technologies, as do cable and satellite service operators. Apple removed DRM technology from iTunes around 2009. Typical DRM also prevents lending materials out through a library, or accessing works in the public domain.
Yes, it literally happened with FMHY’s Lemmy instance. Lost access to the original domain, started again from scratch on a different domain, but their users didn’t come back and already moved in to other instances.
Based on data from fedipact.veganism.social it seems that the majority of instances blocks threads.net. I’m sure there’s Lemmy instances with either approach that have slipped through the cracks as the list is a work in progress....
At the moment, Threads runs from one domain. Do you seriously think it’s going to stay that way? They also have 100 million users, compared to less than 2 million across the entire fediverse. Once Threads gets serious about federation - maybe a year or two from now - what you’re suggesting is going to be like constant whack-a-mole. That’s in no way a fun prospect.
And even if they stick with one domain (which they won’t) - the hate groups on Threads will still be producing content that other fediverse users will be talking about/linking to/quoting etc. The fediverse is very quickly going to become a miserable place to be for those who thought they had found a place where they could be free of all that harassment.
I would personally suggest ghostarchive or archive.org over archive.is. They purposefully poison their DNS responses to Cloudflare, because they disagree with how Cloudflare handles DNS.
So if you’re like me and use Cloudflare for DNS, you can’t actually access any archive.is sites because they purposefully break the DNS response to Cloudflare.
From Cloudflare’s CEO via HackerNews: (Added emphasis is my own)
We don’t block archive.is or any other domain via 1.1.1.1. Doing so, we believe, would violate the integrity of DNS and the privacy and security promises we made to our users when we launched the service.
Archive.is’s authoritative DNS servers return bad results to 1.1.1.1 when we query them. I’ve proposed we just fix it on our end but our team, quite rightly, said that too would violate the integrity of DNS and the privacy and security promises we made to our users when we launched the service.
The archive.is owner has explained that he returns bad results to us because we don’t pass along the EDNS subnet information. This information leaks information about a requester’s IP and, in turn, sacrifices the privacy of users. This is especially problematic as we work to encrypt more DNS traffic since the request from Resolver to Authoritative DNS is typically unencrypted. We’re aware of real world examples where nationstate actors have monitored EDNS subnet information to track individuals, which was part of the motivation for the privacy and security policies of 1.1.1.1.
EDNS IP subsets can be used to better geolocate responses for services that use DNS-based load balancing. However, 1.1.1.1 is delivered across Cloudflare’s entire network that today spans 180 cities. We publish the geolocation information of the IPs that we query from. That allows any network with less density than we have to properly return DNS-targeted results. For a relatively small operator like archive.is, there would be no loss in geo load balancing fidelity relying on the location of the Cloudflare PoP in lieu of EDNS IP subnets.
We are working with the small number of networks with a higher network/ISP density than Cloudflare (e.g., Netflix, Facebook, Google/YouTube) to come up with an EDNS IP Subnet alternative that gets them the information they need for geolocation targeting without risking user privacy and security. Those conversations have been productive and are ongoing. If archive.is has suggestions along these lines, we’d be happy to consider them.
I personally think archive.is is being pretty childish here, and returning bad results on purpose is about as petty as you can get. Anyone who returns bad results because of personal opinions shouldn’t be in charge of anything online, in my opinion. It’s a pretty deep break from a functioning fucking internet.
Not only that, I have the entire Roku domain blocked on my network, and even though there’s no reason for it, as evidenced by the fact that there’s no problem running it for a month, and it doesn’t happen to all TVs, depending when it was last handled, it breaks my Plex app every 30 days in such a way that it needs to be fully reinstalled, which requires unblocking Roku, allowing phone home of the prior month’s data. Old, but not obsolete, app versions should still work fine - have a kodi Plex app that hasn’t been updated in years and that works without issue. So this is absolutely an intentional choice to force users to at least cough up their viewing data, even if they can’t give you their ads. And they can collect a surprising amount of information through those apps.
Took me a couple months to figure out what was happening (by waiting 2 months and doing the reinstall on the same day for all of them and checking the next time one broke, then staggering them the next time) but I’m no longer using the apps and will probably just factory reset all three of them, leave them off the network entirely.
The amount of work they do as a company to make my private experience complete shit because I don’t want them invasively collecting my info and shoving ads down my throat… is absolutely disgusting.
The Fediverse is currently divided over whether or not to block Threads. Here are some of the things people are worried about, some opportunities that might come from it, and what we need to do to prepare.
Some good ideas in here. I like the idea of allowing users to selectively unblock domains, so that eliminates the whining we’ve heard about how defederating is taking away their freedom of choice, even though it should be the instance’s freedom of choice not to host meta’s hate speech.
Also, as to the concluding paragraph, I agree. I’ve said before this is a good problem to have. The fediverse will get tested against the most dominant social media corporation in the world. If they adopt it and it becomes the de facto standard for many other social media platforms, then it will grow beyond their capacity to control it very quickly.
This doesn’t make sense. You don’t have to be on an instance that federates with Threads or any corporation. You as a user can also block domains. You don’t have to leave and can still enjoy the space on your terms
Artists have complained about their artwork being stolen, people are arguing about threads.net stealing their data on despite this being a public forum, Reddit, Twitter, Github and other platforms are putting up walls to to stop AI bots from scraping everything....
It’s not the solution. It looks more like the problem to me.
As has been said, licensing doesn’t work. When you write something, you automatically have the copyright. With a license, you allow others to copy it, which otherwise would be illegal. For this to work, copyright would have to be extended to cover learning. That’s obviously terrible. But let’s assume for a moment that copyright is only extended to cover machine learning (ML).
You would not be allowed to use anything on the internet for ML, unless there was a license allowing it. It would basically outlaw scraping the net for training data. You’d have to sift through everything to find stuff, with a permissive license. Of course, no for-profit enterprise would pick anything up with an infectious license.
AI companies would have to pay for training licenses. Non-profits that cannot pay would be limited to public domain data: Stuff that is so very old that it is out-of-copyright, some government publications and, of course, your infectiously licensed posts. Sound good?
The for-profit stuff would be more expensive to generate a steady cash-flow to “rights-holders”, like streaming does today.
Well, maybe that’s what you want. For some people, this is simply a matter of ideology. They feel that (intellectual) property is supposed to work like that, and damn the consequences. I’m going to assume you are not like that.
We’d create a new, steady flow of money to property owners, who have to do nothing in return. It’s nice to be rich. I don’t think we need to make it nicer, but that would be the result.
It would be great for corporations like Microsoft that already have a lot of intellectual property for training. It would also be great for the likes of Meta, that can just amend their TOS to get a license from their users. Traditional publishers would likely also see a nice windfall profit, as they’d be able to sell all their old newspapers, magazines and books.
To me, this just seems crazy. It’s doubling down on everything that’s already going wrong.
I’m guessing that that is not the outcome you want. So, the question would be, how you came to support a policy that would lead to it.
I think that’s a bit of an overreaction. the internet at large has many domains. domains are owned (publicly) by corps - filtering would be pretty easy. I also don’t see any benefit for facebook to behave this way. Facebook doesn’t need the fediverse - most of their users already think of them as “the internet”. Facebook has already taken over the internet (and they really haven’t, as it’s very possible to avoid them).
The internet has always been decentralized. It will always be decentralized. Your attention dictates the amount of control the companies you give attention to have power over you.
I used to think that there would be 1, main ‘Fediverse’ with all of the ‘big instances’ connected to each other. The recent Threads debacle has shown me otherwise....
Unless I’m wrong, the unique thing here is that auth fetch is always off for the server. It’s on only at the user level and it’s only on at that level if a user has an active domain block.
That could actually solve a lot of problems for people. Admins are reluctant to enable it server-wide because it causes a bunch of problems. The biggest being that it breaks federation with servers running older software (Mastodon v <3.0 I think) and with other services (Pleroma, maybe others). It also uses more server resources. But there are always people who think it’s worth it.
I think it’s pretty safe to say that the majority of us are here to avoid another corporate takeover of our preferred platforms. It would seem to me to be a tad irresponsible to allow Facebook into our space with open arms, allowing them to hoover up our data. I would love to keep using Lemmy.world, but will happily change...
Not with the way instance blocking works on Lemmy, unlike Mastodon which limits interactions from blocked domains lemmy doesn’t limit interactions at all through user blocks, it just makes them not appear.
Combined with the fact that instance blocking doesn’t even actually block the users from those instances. All it does is filter out every single community. If you read the page on join-lemmy.org it’ll tell you that clear as day.
Like I said for both of these reasons user-based instance blocks on Lemmy should not and cannot be considered an alternative to defederation.
They won’t see any communities from the server they block. Users are not blocked in domain blocking.
Users can now block instances. Similar to community blocks, it means that any posts from communities which are hosted on that instance are hidden. However the block doesn’t affect users from the blocked instance, their posts and comments can still be seen normally in other communities.
It would be difficult to connect you to a Meta account to serve ads to because they only have your user name, profile pic, server IP, and server domain name. In most cases it’d be impossible. You’re pretty well protected because Mastodon servers treat all remote servers as untrustworthy and don’t give them any info.
Facebook already creates “shadow profiles” for people not on Facebook and stores data about them. This means Meta won’t directly monetize the fediverse, but use the data available for their ad business anyway. (Maybe even connect other accounts through posts, but I don’t know how well this works with the info and amount of a users posts.)
Nothing stopping them from doing it now, anyone posting to the fediverse has to accept that their posts can and probably will be used to train someone elses LLM. It’s public afterall.
I also reached out to them on Twitter but they directed me to this form. I followed up with them on Twitter with what happened in this screenshot but they are now ignoring me.
In fact both are optional. With FQDN-Adressing a user without domain defaults to localhost, with Bang-Adressing there is no @ because the last system is left for interpretation of the last receiver and if he consideres it a user, so be it.
Started to move off Google (not strictly self-hosted)
Started to move off Google’s services to proton:...
Is it me or is (desktop) Linux still a terrible experience?
Every so often i start believing all the posts about how Linux really made a lot of progress, and the desktop experience is so much better now, and everything is supported, and i give it another try....
Is DNS Bloat too? (lemmy.sdf.org)
What's the point of a reverse proxy and does cloudflare give all the benefits of one?
Embrace, Extend, Enforce (ƎƎƎ): A practical Strategy against potentially abusive Instances like Meta’s Threads (fungiverse.wordpress.com)
cross-posted from: lemmy.ca/post/12225991...
Warning: You cannot delete posts or comments on Lemmy. It stays up forever, and is in direct violation of GDPR and other national privacy laws.
Title says it. Apparently lemmy devs are not concerned with such worldly matters as privacy, or respecting international privacy laws.
What happens to my instance if my domain expires?
I recently was gifted a raspberry pi 5 and was looking at domains to buy to host my own instance. What happens to my instance if the domain expires?...
Do you actually own anything digital? (www.theregister.com)
Do you actually own anything digital?::From ebooks, to videos and software, the answer is increasingly no
Feddit.UK has finally kicked the bucket- and what happens next. (lemmy.world)
TL;DR, Feddit.UK is down, we’re working on making a fun replacement!...
60% of Lemmy-instances blocks Threads.net (lemmy.sambands.net)
Based on data from fedipact.veganism.social it seems that the majority of instances blocks threads.net. I’m sure there’s Lemmy instances with either approach that have slipped through the cracks as the list is a work in progress....
CT hits highest level of homelessness on record. A baby was born in a shelter; people are dying (www.courant.com)
I got this popup ad on my TV **while watching a DVD** (lemmy.world)
we live in hell...
Getting Tangled Up in Threads (wedistribute.org)
The Fediverse is currently divided over whether or not to block Threads. Here are some of the things people are worried about, some opportunities that might come from it, and what we need to do to prepare.
With AI scraping everything, would it make sense to add copyright notices to comments on the fediverse? CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Deed
Artists have complained about their artwork being stolen, people are arguing about threads.net stealing their data on despite this being a public forum, Reddit, Twitter, Github and other platforms are putting up walls to to stop AI bots from scraping everything....
If we're going to have an effective strategy against FB/Meta, we should clear up some misconceptions around defederation
((I’m not an expert, I’ve been reading up on things as much as I can. If there’s an error, I’ll happily correct it!))...
The Fediverse is working just as intended.
I used to think that there would be 1, main ‘Fediverse’ with all of the ‘big instances’ connected to each other. The recent Threads debacle has shown me otherwise....
Lemmy.world Should Defederate with Threads
I think it’s pretty safe to say that the majority of us are here to avoid another corporate takeover of our preferred platforms. It would seem to me to be a tad irresponsible to allow Facebook into our space with open arms, allowing them to hoover up our data. I would love to keep using Lemmy.world, but will happily change...
Adam Mosseri spells out Threads’ plans for the fediverse | The head of Instagram says a full integration with the fediverse could take ‘the better part of a year’ (www.theverge.com)
I'm locked out of my 6 year old Chipotle account because they now say my email address is invalid when I login. Here is me asking for their help: (lemmy.world)
I also reached out to them on Twitter but they directed me to this form. I followed up with them on Twitter with what happened in this screenshot but they are now ignoring me.