Admiral Patrick

I’m surprisingly level-headed for being a walking knot of anxiety.

Ask me anything.

I also develop Tesseract UI for Lemmy/Sublinks

Avatar by @SatyrSack@feddit.org

  • 9 Posts
  • 354 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgtoFediverse@lemmy.worldMastodon doesn't like Addy aliases
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    6 days ago

    Counterpoint: Good?

    The fediverse has no global identity system. Just like how temporary email addresses protect YOU from spam, disallowing them protects volunteer-run services like Mastodon, Piefed, Lemmy et al from spam (and trolls, etc).

    I do not approve any registration applications from throwaway email providers. Also, volunteer-run services are much less likely to use your email address for nefarious purposes. Data breaches are another thing, but TBH, most of the spam I get is from spammers just spraying out to anything that’s formatted like an email address. Not sure about Mastodon, but Lemmy and Piefed do not reveal your email address to anyone (admin can only see it during singup and in the database). At least in Lemmy, the passwords are hashed, but the standard advice to use a unique password per service applies so that in the event of a data breach, the email+password combo will only compromise that single service.

    I guess the moral of the story is to save the tinfoil hats for BigTech™ and show the Fediverse people, who are trying to do better, that you’re here with good intentions. As an admin, I’ve seen more spam, trolls, and n’eer-do-wells signup with throwaway emails than people who are here because they want to be here, and to a severe enough degree that I will no longer accept registrations using such services.














  • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgtoFediverse@lemmy.worldLemmy vote aggregation idea
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    1 month ago

    Because the Electoral College has worked out so well for us here in the US. /s

    As someone who’s actual real life votes have been watered down all my life, I really don’t want to apply that logic elsewhere.

    Why not just make new account’s votes only count for 3/5 of a vote and send those in aggregate? /s

    The real solution is to be aware of unmoderated / malicious instances. Vote manipulation is something I actively watch for, and I didn’t even see this campaign because I’d already defederated from both of the identified instances as they were already frequent sources of spam. After looking into them, neither seemed actively moderated and both had open signups. Doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure out how that’s going to end up.




  • Is there a way I can get Let’s Encrypt to dole out a wildcard certificate

    Yep. Just specify the domains yourdomain.com and *.yourdomain.com in the certbot request. Wildcard domains require the DNS-based challenge, but you’ve said you’re already good there. You don’t technically need the apex domain (yourdomain.com) but I always add it since I do have services running there.

    Any subdomains under the wildcard can use internal DNS or internal IPs on the public DNS (I do the former, but the latter works too).

    I used to run an internal CA, and it wasn’t too hard to setup a CA and distribute my root cert. Except on mobile devices. On Android it was easy, but there was a persistent warning that my network traffic could be intercepted (which is true when there’s a custom root cert installed), but it since it was my cert, it got annoying seeing that all the time. Not sure if Apple devices can even do that, but regardless, it wasn’t practical for friends who wanted to use my self-hosted services to install a custom cert when they were over.