b3nsn0w

There was a man at CERN once who was sick of questions. His name was Tim-Berners Lee.

only two-letter tlds are controlled by specific countries. i forget who owns the specific tld for .world but i doubt they can pull this trick, there’s a lot of competition there

are you subscribed to any lemmy.world communities? you only get updates if you subscribe

i’d also recommend running lcs to pre-seed your instance, it’s a bit of a space hog but it makes things much easier to use

that would be something you do when registering a domain. you enter what you want and the thing tells you whether it’s available – or you can use one of the domain checker sites that do the same thing, or run a DNS query yourself and see if it resolves with NXDOMAIN (although that might be wrong, i’m not completely up to date on the details of this one)

lol, yeah, that would crash any instance

(jokes aside, you’ll probably need to keep it somewhat low-res, and i’d also recommend cropping it to square. my instance uses a 128x128 icon)

i’m currently hosting an instance for about 20 users on a dual-core epyc-7002 based cloud vm with 2 gb of ram and currently a 50 gb ssd volume. memory tends to sit around halfway and total disk usage is 14 GB, of which it’s 4.5 GB for the picture server and 2.3 GB for the database for now, i’m monitoring both in case upgrades are needed. cpu usage is quite low, usually sits between 5-10% and never went above 25%. it was the highest during a spambot attack when they tried to register hundreds of accounts – speaking of, enable captcha (broken on 0.18.0) or set registrations to approve-only.

i’m paying about $10-15 per month currently, which includes a cache to keep the instance snappy.

holy hell

lmao just how powerful is your server icon?

https://pricefield.org for me. i’ve seen the move to lemmy, thought for half a second about my favorite fandom, and knew it had to happen.

it’s been a rougher ride than i expected but it’s hella exciting

you might wanna clean up your database there. at least purge anyone from the local_user table who doesn’t belong there so that they can’t log in. if you also remove all the relevant entries from person it will fix the displayed user count as well.

I’m gonna preface this: IANAL either.

There are also different legal bases for different kinds of data processing. For example, I’m pretty sure ensuring your site’s security counts as legitimate interest, and it’s pretty common that IP addresses are stored and processed as such. You don’t need to remove someone’s IP from your access logs just because they asked for it, because your interest in keeping your site secure for both yourself and everyone else outweighs their interest in the privacy of their data. Legitimate interest is the fuzziest of the six legal bases and it doesn’t help that advertisers have started attempting to qualify their BS as “legitimate interest” especially in consent forms (if they need your consent it’s not legitimate interest, it’s user consent, and they really should stop lying) but it still exists to keep things viable.

As a rule of thumb, if you’re storing data to provide a service you need to export or delete that data upon request, and if you’re doing anything over what’s strictly necessary for providing your service you need to ask the user about it. And you’re right, this applies to anyone whose instance is used by EU citizens.

Also, pseudonymous data still counts as personal data as long as the pseudonym can be linked back to personally identifiable information. You need to sever this link to comply with a deletion request.

yup, that sounds perfect

i can’t track down a non vendor-specific guide right now but if you just expose the same settings in config.env that you’d have in the lemmy.hjson file that should be more than sufficient to get an external service going

On the surface, setting up an external mail server is actually super easy. Pretty much every service supports SMTP, so all you need is to find your credentials (an endpoint, a username, and a password) and input that in your lemmy.hjson file, along with a sender address. There is a verification process with every email provider, you will usually have to set some DNS records to prove you own the domain you’re trying to send from, but once you do these two things, emails will just start flying out.

The actual process tends to be a little more tedious though. Pretty much every mail provider wants to sell you on their specific super awesome API and only mentions SMTP as a footnote, for reasons that I can only parse as an attempted vendor lock-in. They also sometimes make the verification process difficult. SendGrid, for example, immediately redirects you to their “sender identities” which are more useful for their marketing automation tooling than they are for automated emails from a website, and you also have to dig a fair bit to find the SMTP credentials. (The endpoint is smtp.sendgrid.net, apikey on the username, and whatever your API key is for the password, you’ll need to set one of those up.) They also have a number of different tracking things that you’ll have to find and turn off in the UI (luckily all of them can be toggled in the same place), which would normally actually help you by providing you statistics about how many emails were opened and how many people clicked on links, but for the emails Lemmy sends, it’s useless and I didn’t want SendGrid to collect that data on my instance users, so I shut that off.

Initially, I wanted to use Amazon SES, but they have an even more tedious setup: you have to talk to an actual human to have them turn it on for you, otherwise you’re stuck in sandbox mode and can only send email to verified receiver addresses. Their service works well though, I used it a lot in my freelancer days, and they do make it fairly straightforward to find the SMTP credentials, but the verification process can be slow.

I also remember using Mailgun for some project ages ago, it was pretty much the same deal as all the others: you have to pry the SMTP details out of their docs, but once you do and you verify your stuff, it works well.

Ultimately, I think the best you could do to help out users here is to provide them with documentation for a few of these services: exactly where to go, which buttons to click and whatnot. Or just stick to the embedded service for a bit, but the real issue there is the bounce rates from spammers. They made my instance send out like 60-70 verification emails for bogus addresses on gmail, yahoo, hotmail, and live.com on the first day I got federation working, and if you don’t already have a good reputation – which is what these third parties help you with – then you can easily get yourself blacklisted, either internally or externally.

how well do those email servers work to begin with? i just flat out disabled the postfix relay on my instance and simply configured sendgrid, which works perfectly, no delays or spam folder issues (although i did have to disable a bunch of tracking bullshit). doing so with similar services has been my go-to card in freelance webdev, because getting other mail servers to trust you can be hard, so i’m interested in the experience people are having with those. (i’d much prefer to self-host email too, but providing a good experience is the primary goal)