I love the idea of taking on a monopoly, but I don’t like that, without regulation, it has a low chance of success, and the consumer gets to suffer as the monopoly fights back.

90% of email sent today is encrypted between servers but even if it’s not, it’s probably 1000x harder to intercept an email than a fax.

You could impersonate a telephone company worker, twist a speaker to a phone line, and literally record the noise with your phone to get a reproducible fax image.

Email is going to be a lot harder. A lot.

There’s barely any analog phone lines anymore anyway so you could say that probably made fax more secure, but that has nothing to do with fax being inherently secure. It’s the opposite of that.

Ahh. I see. I took a look at the script. “Blocked Users,” is not reported by an instance, but rather It’s calculated by this script by looking at “Blocked Instances,” which is reported. How many active users each blocked instance has and then summing this together, the script shows “BU.” I was thinking it was an explicit list of users the instance blocked based on ban/block lists.

It’s a derivative, but still useful metric, I guess. BU could be high, but BI could be low and vice-versa.

This could always change at the whim of an admin as well. It’s good to have admin “teams” and even foundations, but a lot of the time there’s one person making those decisions.

Users and communities could be more portable. Admins should get to decide what is on their instance for sure, but right now there’s kind of a “lock in.” Which give admins disproportional control / responsibility. IMO.

You mean blocked instances right? AFAIK an instances “blocked users” is not published in aggregate. You’d have to comb through the modlog.

More “portable” and secure identities would have been a good feature. The client could have handled most of the crypto required for signing and validating content. As it stands now, the instance Admin has complete control over your identity. Portable communities would follow that easily.

Most of the syncing issues are actually between the large instances or instances that having performance issues.

I had a “bearstein effect” moment just now. I had thought wireshark sold out. Like “Wireshark by Rapid7,” but i just checked and it looks like they’ve stayed the FOSS course! Way to go!

If the only criteria to be in a private channel for admins is being an admin, there’s no use making it private. ;) Unless your just looking to filter out bad actors who don’t want to take 5 min and 5$ to make an instance.

FYI for anyone looking to deface more instances, That list is only updated every 24 hours. Depending on when it last run on your home instance, the info could be out of date.

You’re not misunderstanding. They just solve more than one issue, and create a few too.

That’s a personal preference though. You don’t have a need for a relay. There are more than a few people who want to run their own instance and at least browse all the things without having to subscribe to them. This is a news aggregator at the core after all.

I’ve been pondering trying to make one, but it’s not going to be a cake-walk. The tool (that was a script) I wrote ruffled some feathers for it’s potential to destroy the lemmyverse. While I don’t believe that could happen. I’m still interested in something easier and more integrated.

The theory is simple and I am willing to take a stab at it, but there might be road blocks trying to make or incorporate changes to the actual lemmy code.

That, is actually kind of fascinating and may be important info for someone doing a follow-up investigation. If that was the bad actor phishing for moderation access, why would they need that, when they already had an admin account? If it was legit, then it’s super sus. whoever this app developer was needs to have a little light shone on them.

TBF, at least you’re doing something.

You do you. I would tell my users I have no idea what’s going on, and definitely not say “using your open tabs is probably fine.”

I think this carrying on without providing more information is reckless. Does an actual admin from this instance really know what happened or are you just taking a bunch of random commentary and speculation as gospel then telling the users “we’re good.”

People can defederate from an instance for any reason they want, but if I get what you’re trying to say: you think people should defederate from any instance that has a user that subscribes to all of their communities.

I actually wrote it with the flip side of your centralization argument in mind. If a community exists outside of the popular ones a user may never even know of its existence. Having more show up SHOULD be better to prevent centralization no? It requires the users to change their browsing behaviour but at least they don’t have gonsearching offsite.

Yup. 256 GB should be enough database space for anyone though.

A handy chart: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/18/a4/2f/18a42ffa5c733c7c6bb86b547fb0647f.png

It’s a cruel irony that we use an enclosure to help print materials with a higher Tg but the printer itself is printed of materials with the same or lower Tg. It makes perfect sense that your ABS parts are going to get mushy when you crank your heated bed to 100 and put the whole thing in a box. :)