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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Federation is like instead of having single reddit you would have many different reddits under different domains, they have their own subreddits. You don’t need to create separate account on every reddit, you can theoretically access those subreddits from any of those reddit servers.

    Now, defederation is breaking that. If there’s reddit-A and reddit-B, you have account on reddit-A and they both de-federated, you won’t be able to access subreddits from reddit-B.

    I think one of lemmy servers that defederates the most is perhaps beehaw.org. Their goal is to create welcoming space accepting everyone. So they defederated from servers that they believe is ruining that experience, either because admins of those servers are not proactive, or outright support stances that beehaw.org does not tolerate.



  • The difference is different admins, different policy (for example one lemmy could let anyone in, another, like beehaw asks to write why they should let you in, and that you will obey their rules).

    There are also things like some settings, for example beehaw disables downvotes, they also don’t federate with lemmy servers that notoriously break their policies.

    So best bet would be to choose server which policy fits you the best.

    Also some people might want to choose the biggest and most open server. That could be good but because the server is open to everyone it might struggle fighting abuse and also go down because of high load. Such server is lemmy.world right now.

    BTW: this might be useful https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances




  • In an ideal encryption, the resulting data should be indistinguishable from random when doing statistical analysis.

    So yes, such data will be really hard to compress, so typically compression is done before encryption.

    Now here’s a twist. The compression before encryption can reveal some details about the encrypted data. This is especially true if attacker has a way to generate encrypted message with part of information that is being encrypted (for example some kind of token etc).
    There were attacks on it. For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRIME or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BREACH (this was during that idiotic phase where vulnerabilities had those lame-ass names and they even created webpages)

    Ideally compression would be done after encryption, but because of issues described earlier, that wouldn’t give any benefit.