Most of us are Reddit refugees, and probably clicking more random links than we ever did before on websites we’ve never seen before. This whole experience feels like the old internet, but also throws up insane red flags with a modern internet perspective. What are the cybersecurity weaknesses we should all be looking for, and what are the best practices?
Here’s my reason for posting this. As I search for new communities across instances to follow, I sometimes end up clicking a link and I’m no longer logged in. In the corner, that could be a Sign In link or it could be phishing. It’s likely due to me not understanding how to properly navigate this system, but there’s nothing stopping someone from setting up a sight like this as far as I know.
Thoughts?
If you’re navigating to another community on their instance, you won’t be logged in. When you’re seeing that, check the URL. If you’re on lemmy.ml, you’re still on your instance; if not, you’ve navigated to that instance.
There’s multiple ways to structure links, some of which will take you to that community via your instance, some not.
Could it be phishing? Sure. But far more likely, you’re just on another instance where you don’t have an account (or at least an active login).
Do you mind giving a short explainer of proper link formatting? I was struggling with this just a little bit ago
If you link directly to the full URL (including the instance), you’ll take anyone who clicks it to that instance, and they won’t be logged in. This is usually not what you want. Example: https://pawb.social/c/tech - This link will take you to my instance.
If you remove the instance URL, and just leave /c/communityname@instance - for example, /c/tech@pawb.social - the link will still take you to the community, but you’ll still be on your instance. This is usually desirable.
Basically, instance -> community = link to that instance. Community -> instance = link to the community in whatever instance the user clicks it in.
You can also use ! instead of /c/ - I think this might work better for Kbin users (since they use /m/ instead of /c/ - can’t verify this). In that case, it’d be: !tech@pawb.social
I won’t get tired of posting this everywhere it applies :D
I made this userscript, which rewrites all links everywhere (not only on Lemmy) to always point to your home instance. So the link in your comment actually looks like this to me:
i.e. even though you tried to link to your instance, my script rewrote your link back to my instance so it’s working fine :D
But of course I can still hover over the icon to see how your link originally looked:
Would be nice if third party apps implemented that functionality.
Or if there were bots that automatically identify those external links and reply to them with a link to the community/post in other popular instances.
This is great, and would make for a super useful Firefox extension.
Why would or should this be a Firefox extension when it already runs perfectly well on Firefox?
I guess I’ve never run scripts in Firefox.
As soon as you’ve installed your preferred user script extension like Violentmonkey it’s as simple as installing addons, you just click the “install” link on the script’s page.
There are lots of different useful ones.
As far as I know, there are a few different link formats, and how well they work depends on which frontend you’re using:
- amateur_radio
- !amateur_radio@lemmy.radio (The Web interface gave me autocomplete options for this)
- https://lemmy.radio/c/amateur_radio
EDIT: At least using the web app, the first link is relative, and the others are not. So I think the correct format would be
/c/<community>@<instance>for communities outside your instance.
Third party apps present a username and password field to log into a Lemmy instance. They can easily just steal your credentials. There are standard auth flows to solve this problem. The fact that Lemmy devs have willfully ignored this issue for years, and that they aren’t warning users not to trust third party apps, lead me to believe they don’t really care about security, which is the biggest red flag. There’s finally an open github issue that seems to be acknowledged, but it’ll be some time before this feature (if ever) ever gets implemented.
-Posted from a third-party app; yea, i gave them my password blindly.
All the more reason to not reuse passwords, use a password manager, and turn on 2FA.
There’s finally an open github issue that seems to be acknowledged, but it’ll be some time before this feature (if ever) ever gets implemented.
Fwiw, the devs seem quite open to (even directly requesting) people coding features they want and having them added into the main code in future versions. So if anyone is able and willing to make a working version of that for Lemmy, it could be added quite soon, really.
There seems to be a fair bit of admins who just run the Lemmy Ansible installer expecting to magically have an instance, and having no idea what they’re getting themselves into.
I wonder how many small Lemmy instances exist right now that have SSH password auth (or god forbid root login of any kind) enabled.
This is my fear. A huge wave of newbs (myself included) all out here trying to figure it out. I feels like a hacker playground.
Does DEFCON have a fediverse hacking competition this year?
A big one I see that if you join any instance it’s someone else computer. Not different from Meta/Reddit. But the probability that among all the instance there is one imposter who wants to steal your credential is non zero.
As usual don’t use the same password everywhereI don’t understand what the point of making more than one account really is if we can view and post to or from any community or instance
They don’t mean don’t use the same password for other accounts on Lemmy, they mean don’t use the same password for other accounts period. Use a password manager or something, and generate a new password for each account. If you use the same one across different services, if one gets hacked they have access to all of them that used the same credentials.
