this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2023
37 points (91.1% liked)

Selfhosted

39931 readers
463 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I recently was gifted a raspberry pi 5 and was looking at domains to buy to host my own instance. What happens to my instance if the domain expires?

Also, do freenom and .tk just not allow new domains to be registered anymore?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] russjr08@bitforged.space 3 points 10 months ago

ActivityPub does use cryptographic keys for Actors ("users" in this case) - so even in theory if you were to destroy your instance and then set it up on the same domain and recreate the user, things would be quite broken still... But unfortunately it still does rely on the domain name itself, so I agree.

I think the problem is, without the domain name, there is no way for you to lookup who @russjr08 would be, or where to send data to them. The domain effectively acts as a mailing address (a well suited analogy considering that ActivityPub also uses inboxes/outboxes) so that Instance A always knows that User B can be found on Instance B.

I doubt its an impossible challenge to solve, but probably quite a difficult one I'm sure.