5 ms·

Why not just get a stable, world-reachable[1] IP address? All the services you use have them. You can too. When you have your own, then you can run your own

by __b__ 10y ago

Why not just get a stable, world-reachable[1] IP address? All the services you use have them. You can too. When you have your own, then you can run your own "services", not to mention many other possibilities, such as true decentralized communications -- no third party servers needed. 1. "World-reachable" means you control the firewall, not a third party. Alternatively, be satisfied and keep depending on third parties. Google: "Let us make many consecutive requests to your webserver, download and store copies of your content." You: "Agreed." You: "Let me make many consecutive reuqests to your webserver, download and store copies of my own or other people's content." Google: "Sorry". Then Google makes your content available to others, but only for a few searches at time[2]. To add insult to injury, it sells advertising and, if the regulators are correct, promotes its own websites -- all serving user-generated content -- as people are searching through publicly available information. "Middleman" or "service"? 2. Any attempt to collect in bulk results in IP ban. Compare Internet Archive who encourages users to crawl their collection. Organizing public information sounds like a lovely goal for a company, until you realize it will be access controlled (it's public information), laden with ads (because the company cannot support itself without advertisers), user tracking for the advertisers and that the changes to the algorithms that include or exclude results are secret. And there will be no index. You can only access the data through search. Moving beyond the first page of results is OK only so long as you do not go "too fast" or go too deep -- you will never get to page 100 witout first being banned. WTF?

daenney 10y ago
What you'd need to get is provider independent (PI) address space and you're not going to get that, at least not for v4, as an individual, anymore. You're then going to have to find someone that will announce that prefix for you (Amazon could) or do that yourself (which also means getting an AS number and peering with people at internet exchanges, assuming you can get away with that without also getting some paying transit) and then start building out your infrastructure. That's a rather unreasonable amount of hoops to put someone without a strong technical background through. Having a custom domain would get your far enough in this case, owning your own IP address isn't really needed.
- a3n 10y ago
  So the intent of the meta-domains I mentioned in my original might be better served by a personal IPv6 block, that doesn't come from a corporation's reserved blocks. Just as I move my domain around between email (and other) providers, I could then move my IPv6 block around. Instead of asking Linode for an IP address out of their block, I could tell them "serve this block." (Or can we already do that? For a reasonable price?)
  - daenney 10y ago
    Yet with only a personal IPv6 block half the world can't access your resources so that's not a reasonable method at this time. If you control the DNS there's no real need for owning your own IP addresses as you can just change what they point to. That's usually also much faster to do in a pinch than find a new party that will announce your block and convince the old one to stop doing so. That's usually hours if not days in lead time. Though if you truly care enough about it you'll also want your own DNS servers and own gTLD in order to own the whole chain.
    - __b__ 10y ago
      And to serve that private gTLD to others, you'll need a reachable IP address. :)
  - lmm 10y ago
    IP addresses are meant to be addresses; if you move your address around everyone else has to update their routing tables. To do what you want you probably want to get your own AS Number and actually participate in routing (BGP etc). I've heard of quite small businesses doing that, but not individuals.
    - calgoo 10y ago
      I was looking to do this, but it was just too hard. I believe you need to have a company / association of some kind with a VAT number to get registered. The closest I have found is going with the IPv6 tunnels from someone like Hurricane Electric, but speed is a bit limited.
vroombaprime 10y ago
Good luck getting email to work with that setup though.
- a3n 10y ago
  Yeah, at that point, in this day and age, running email either has to be your day job to keep that running, or you as an individual have to at least be capable of doing that job; most people aren't, and I pay Fastmail to get that done.
  - calgoo 10y ago
    I did it for 2 years until November last year. Its not... too hard. You find the pages where you can keep an eye on you address etc. Issues normally happen because of two things: 1. Misconfigured servers: This is the hardest part. Rule number 1: keep it as small as possible. Disable everything, and then only enable what you need. Rule 2: READ, I mean read every document, blog post etc you can find about e-mail, email attacks, etc. 2. IP address: The normal address you get from Digital Occean or Linode for example, are normally horrible as a lot of spam has been sent from them. If your lucky it might work, but check the lists for those IPs. Try to change if you can, until you find one with low scores. Also, I dont know if this helped, but i had my domain on both Gmail and Outlook servers for a while before migrating to my own servers. I dont know if this helped me to not get stuck in their filters etc? Or I was just lucky i guess :) I finally moved because I did not have the energy to keep up with the server etc, and when i noticed that i had not even logged on to the server for 3 months, i just moved it to gmail. I am however looking at migrating away from google, as i don't like the web interface (use it from the iPad now). So who knows where I'll end up next.
- __b__ 10y ago
  "Email" as it is run today by third parties. Email dates back to timesharing, when people shared computers, each user having an "email account" on a single computer. For people today, each with their own computer, it's still possible to do email without store and forward, with each user running SMTP servers that talk directly to each other instead of connecting to "email providers". This is grassroots. Not meant to leverage existing "email provider" ecosystem.

by __b__ 10y ago

daenney 10y ago

What you'd need to get is provider independent (PI) address space and you're not going to get that, at least not for v4, as an individual, anymore. You're then going to have to find someone that will announce that prefix for you (Amazon could) or do that yourself (which also means getting an AS number and peering with people at internet exchanges, assuming you can get away with that without also getting some paying transit) and then start building out your infrastructure. That's a rather unreasonable amount of hoops to put someone without a strong technical background through. Having a custom domain would get your far enough in this case, owning your own IP address isn't really needed.

a3n 10y ago
So the intent of the meta-domains I mentioned in my original might be better served by a personal IPv6 block, that doesn't come from a corporation's reserved blocks. Just as I move my domain around between email (and other) providers, I could then move my IPv6 block around. Instead of asking Linode for an IP address out of their block, I could tell them "serve this block." (Or can we already do that? For a reasonable price?)
- daenney 10y ago
  Yet with only a personal IPv6 block half the world can't access your resources so that's not a reasonable method at this time. If you control the DNS there's no real need for owning your own IP addresses as you can just change what they point to. That's usually also much faster to do in a pinch than find a new party that will announce your block and convince the old one to stop doing so. That's usually hours if not days in lead time. Though if you truly care enough about it you'll also want your own DNS servers and own gTLD in order to own the whole chain.
  - __b__ 10y ago
    And to serve that private gTLD to others, you'll need a reachable IP address. :)
- lmm 10y ago
  IP addresses are meant to be addresses; if you move your address around everyone else has to update their routing tables. To do what you want you probably want to get your own AS Number and actually participate in routing (BGP etc). I've heard of quite small businesses doing that, but not individuals.
  - calgoo 10y ago
    I was looking to do this, but it was just too hard. I believe you need to have a company / association of some kind with a VAT number to get registered. The closest I have found is going with the IPv6 tunnels from someone like Hurricane Electric, but speed is a bit limited.

vroombaprime 10y ago

Good luck getting email to work with that setup though.

a3n 10y ago
Yeah, at that point, in this day and age, running email either has to be your day job to keep that running, or you as an individual have to at least be capable of doing that job; most people aren't, and I pay Fastmail to get that done.
- calgoo 10y ago
  I did it for 2 years until November last year. Its not... too hard. You find the pages where you can keep an eye on you address etc. Issues normally happen because of two things: 1. Misconfigured servers: This is the hardest part. Rule number 1: keep it as small as possible. Disable everything, and then only enable what you need. Rule 2: READ, I mean read every document, blog post etc you can find about e-mail, email attacks, etc. 2. IP address: The normal address you get from Digital Occean or Linode for example, are normally horrible as a lot of spam has been sent from them. If your lucky it might work, but check the lists for those IPs. Try to change if you can, until you find one with low scores. Also, I dont know if this helped, but i had my domain on both Gmail and Outlook servers for a while before migrating to my own servers. I dont know if this helped me to not get stuck in their filters etc? Or I was just lucky i guess :) I finally moved because I did not have the energy to keep up with the server etc, and when i noticed that i had not even logged on to the server for 3 months, i just moved it to gmail. I am however looking at migrating away from google, as i don't like the web interface (use it from the iPad now). So who knows where I'll end up next.
__b__ 10y ago
"Email" as it is run today by third parties. Email dates back to timesharing, when people shared computers, each user having an "email account" on a single computer. For people today, each with their own computer, it's still possible to do email without store and forward, with each user running SMTP servers that talk directly to each other instead of connecting to "email providers". This is grassroots. Not meant to leverage existing "email provider" ecosystem.