• 6 Posts
  • 153 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 18th, 2023

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  • Welcome to the Fediverse! Somebody has probably told you this, but I just realized that I forgot to hit “Post” before I went to dinner. Here it is anyways.

    When I wanted to sign-up it required an application that you needed to fill out with one of the requirements being having to copy a sentence from the link provided which links to some article called “The Principles of Communism” which I thought was very odd for a site to do. I’ve never seen a site like this promoting some ideology that directly where it’s part of the sign-up process to almost pledge to some political or religious ideology.

    The applications and copying of a particular line is a simple form of spam prevention. The fact that the line is from “The Principles of Communism" is probably because the owners of that particular instance (who are also the main developers) are communist. I believe they also run Lemmygrad, which is full on Marxist, and one of the more commonly blocked instances. Lemmy.ml is intended to be a more mainstream instance but like much of the Fedi leans hard left.

    I mainly moved here because of the censorship on Reddit where they didn’t publish posts that included the slightest word not allowed by their filter and they removed/blocked lots of content. I wonder if it will be somewhat better here

    Lemmy is censorship resistant, but not censorship free. There is a difference. Censorship (or moderation, depending on your view point) happens at 3 levels, user, community, and instance. You can’t do much if other users find you obnoxious and decide to block you, but if you find the moderation of a community to be over bearing and if your current instance allows, you can create your own community from your current instance and mod it how you see fit within the guidelines of your instance. If you find your instance’s moderation to be overbearing, you can create your own instance and moderate it however you see fit. However, you will still be subject to the moderation policies of the communities (and their home instances) that you subscribe to.

    In the Fedi you have absolute freedom of speech, but nobody is required to give you a soapbox or megaphone and nobody is required to listen to you.



  • Callously, when the survivors look back and decide to call it one. As far as I know there isn’t an agreed upon definition.

    WW1 was originally called the War to End All Wars, I think, by many at the time. WW2 eclipsed it by taking place on at least 3 continents and across every ocean. Both are also known by other names that depend on the region. The US Civil War eclipsed both in the number of casualties. The Ukraine war isn’t likely to break records like that.





  • since I don’t want to pay for SSL certificates to setup https.

    You don’t need to pay for SSL certs anymore, most of the time. You can get them for free from a bunch of different places now. I use Let’s Encrypt. The web server/reverse proxy I use, Caddy is able to automatically get a cert for you, install it, and keep it renewed. The only time you need to pay for a cert is if you are handling financial transactions.

    Are there security issues I should address preemptively?

    WordPress itself has a generally good reputation for security, though depending on how the current drama goes, that may change. WordPress security problems have almost always stemmed from plugins or poor password hygiene. Remove any plugins you are not actively using, keep the ones you are using updated, and use a good password that you don’t use anywhere else. A password wallet like Bit Warden can generate and store such passwords for you.

    Better on the security front would be to evaluate whether you actually need something like WordPress at all. A static site would likely be far more secure. There’s less moving parts that might be vulnerable.

    While you could program a static site yourself, it’s more common nowadays to use a static site generator like Hugo to build the site. You set it up once for how you want the site to look and then you write your posts in markdown or whatever your particular generator uses.

    I don’t have anything to manage my dynamic IP

    Most domain name providers have some sort of setup for dealing with dynamic IP addresses, a program called ddclient is pretty common and is available in most repos.