As more people flock over to the fediverse from reddit, twitter and other centralised proprietary networks it is important that you keep your e-mail and other important accounts safe from hijacking attempts. Since anyone can simply spin up an instance and host users and communities it is important that you don’t divulge your internet personal details to anyone as these can be harvested by the instance owner and by any instance you erroneously try to login to or simply the instance could be hacked and the user data harvasted. With this in mind here are some suggestions for good OPSEC (Operation Security):
- Don’t use your main e-mail address. Either create a new one or better sign up for an e-mail forwarding service and set-up forwarding addresses for each instance you sign up to. Since these are throw away addresses, if it gets leaked you can just delete the address and create a new one without compromising your main e-mail address. (Bonus: this can also be used to use unique addresses for traditional web services and make it easy to know how and from where an address got leaked)
Here is a nice article with some e-mail forwarding providers to get you started
- Use a password manager and generate strong and unique passwords for any and all instances and services you use, this way you won’t divulge a password used on another account to the instance owner, or if the address used (especially if you used your main e-mail address)/got leaked your account will still be safe from hijacking by attempting to use password dictionaries to guess the password.
Some passvault suggestions:
- Passbolt (self hosted)
- Bitwarden (self hosted and hosted options)
- Vaultwarden (unlocked self hosted alternative to bitwarden)
These are my main security suggestions for all you new and existing lemmings. Feel free to suggest other security considerations to have and other services beyond those mentioned. Stay safe and have fun posting and commenting.
You could also use an instance that doesn’t require email for signups. Like fmhy or lemmynsfw.
If they don’t use email, how do these instances prevent themselves from being immediately overrun by bots?
Fmhy requires you to write a sentence with a certain number in it and use manual approval of accounts. I don’t know about lemmynsfw.
It’s the same with lemmy.one, took me a few days to get in without an email waiting for approval
Captcha or signup questions/response.
I think I only had about 10 bots sign up on my instance - caught the beginning of the wave before it kicked off
Or you could use a temporary email service, though I’m not sure what the services do with the temporary addresses after they expire. If someone knows, please enlighten me.