A few of mine that I use daily…

Networky Things:

• Caddy
• Tailscale
• Headscale
• Go Simple Tunnel (GoST)

A couple of personal projects:

• Skyhook (Data exfiltration server)
• Eavesarp

Would I trust them to not masquerade as me?..

Masquerading is literally the term used for this.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time as a penetration tester and one of the first things we do once we recover credentials is check for validity against online accounts known to be good for a given user. We do that because it simulates attackers and government operators alike. It’s a guarantee that free credentials will be abused in one manner or another when they’re available to government entities.

The obvious control for this is to maintain a unique password for each account but that’s not always feasible for users due to myriad conditions.

Agreed, but we have to trust the instances we keep accounts on. Trust is subjective, but I certainly wouldn’t trust a government ran instance for anything other than an outlet for information originating from the owning government.

If I run a private instance or know the maintainer of another, then I can have greater confidence in the security/privacy implementations.

My mistake.

My mistake.

Probably a poor decision to be creating accounts on government operated instances. Since they own the server, they’re in a position to:

1. Siphon credentials and attempt reuse to gain access to distinct services
2. Ban individual accounts
3. Censor based on post content

I’m all for government support and adoption of open-source software so long as they’re not in the position to disrupt how it’s used by the public at large.

Edit (my perspective is relevant, but doesn’t apply in this case): My nerd impulses outran my willingness to read the link’s content. Seems it’s not for public registration.

Edit 2: Like my cornbread eating American ass can read Dutch anyway 🤣

Sure can! It’s a bit involved and there are security considerations to take into account. Those who deploy their own instance have to make sure the underlying services are well-configured and patched. This happened yesterday, for instance. Hard to know the exact scope of the compromise, but in bad circumstances it could have compromised everyone’s credentials who has registered on lemmy.world. I’ve no reason to believe that’s the case…just saying it’s a thing.

Just started learning about the fediverse but I suspect everything goes down with the ship. Sort of creates a development opportunity for community driven backup utilities, though. Interesting problems are fun development challenges :)

I just joined and I suspect that you’re correct: there’s an overall learning curve. No snarky tone intended, but explaining decentralization to those who would likely struggle with grasping the basic client/server model is going to be challenge.

Shoot, I’ve got 10 years pentesting and R&D under my belt and it took me a while to weigh the pros and cons of creating an account on a public instance or self-hosting. (Will self-host eventually…enjoying a test drive.)