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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: October 23rd, 2023

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  • FishFace@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldThe Web We Lost
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    2 months ago

    From the user’s perspective it’s not about “reach”; it’s about simply having people to interact with. If you go to a thread on reddit there’ll be hundreds or thousands of people to talk about it with, and there’ll be active communities for all kinds of niches. If you want to avoid reddit - whether because of privacy issues or site policy or mods or whatever - you have to deal with the fact that everyone else is sticking with reddit.














  • An overarching principle of security is that of minimum privilege: everything (every process, every person) should have the minimum privileges it needs to do what it does, and where possible, that privilege should be explicitly granted temporarily and then dropped.

    This means that any issue: a security breach or a mistake can’t access or break anything except whatever the component or person who had the issue could access or break, and that that access is minimal.

    Suppose that you hit a page which exploits the https://www.hkcert.org/security-bulletin/mozilla-firefox-remote-code-execution-vulnerability_20230913 vulnerability in Firefox, or one like it, allowing remote code execution. If Firefox is running as root, the remote attacker now completely controls that machine. If you have SSH keys to other servers on there, they are all compromised. Your personal data could be encrypted for ransom. Anything that server manages, such as a TV or smart home equipment, could be manipulated arbitrarily, and possibly destroyed.

    The same is true for any piece of software you use, because this is a general principle. Most distributions I believe don’t let you ssh in as root for that reason.

    In short: don’t log in to anything as root; log in as a regular user and use sudo to temporarily perform administrator actions.

    P.S. your description of the situation shows you don’t know the nature of vulnerabilities and security - if you’re running servers then this is something you should learn more about in short order.


  • If you federate with something too massive though it has undue weight on the entire system. It is likely to be Embrace, Extend, Extinguish again, and it’s reasonable to want to avoid that.

    For people who don’t remember, the pattern would be something like:

    1. Federate and use the existing ecosystem to help you grow and to grow mutually (Embrace)
    2. Add new features that only work locally, drawing users away from other instances to your own (Extend)
    3. Defederate - the remainder is left with a fraction of the users since many moved away, so the users on the local instance don’t care. (Extinguish)

    It depends whether 2 actually succeeds at pulling users in. Arguably most people already on the Fediverse are unlikely to jump ship to Facebook, but you have to consider what happens in a few years if it’s grown, but Facebook is a huge name which makes people less likely to join other instances.