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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • I actually agree. For the majority of sites and/or use cases, it probably is sufficient.

    Explaining properly why LE is generally problematic, takes considerable depth of information, that I’m just not able to relay easily right now. But consider this:

    LE is mostly a convenience. They save an operator $1 per month per certificate. For everyone with hosting costs beyond $1000, this is laughable savings. People who take TLS seriously often have more demands than “padlock in the browser UI”. If a free service decides they no longer want to use OCSP, that’s an annoying disruption that was entirely not worth the $1 https://www.abetterinternet.org/post/replacing-ocsp-with-crls/

    LE has no SLA. You have no guarantee to be able to ever renew your certificate again. A risk not anyone should take.

    Who is paying for LE? If you’re not paying, how can you rely on the service to exist tomorrow?

    It’s not too long ago that people said “only some sites need HTTPS, HTTP is fine for most”. It never was, and people should not build anything relevant on “free” security today either.


  • gencha@lemm.eetoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldPaid SSL vs Letsencrypt
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    2 months ago

    People who have actually relevant use cases with the need for a reliable partner would never use LE. It’s a gimmick for hobbyists and people who suck at their job.

    If you have never revoked a certificate, you don’t really know what you’re doing. If you have never run into rate-limiting issues with LE that block a rollout, you don’t know what you’re doing.

    LE works until it doesn’t, and then it’s like every other free service on the internet: no guarantees If your setup relies on the goodwill of a single entity handing out shit for free, it’s not a robust setup. If you rely on that entity to keep an OCSP responder alive for free so all your consumers can verify the validity of your certificate, that’s not great. And people do this to save their company $1 a month for the real thing? Even running the shitty certbot in compute has a larger cost. People are so blindly in love with this “free” garbage. The fanboys will never die off



  • I get that, I really do, and I honestly believe you have exactly the right idea.

    But on the other hand, you have to realize that not all of the money purely goes to enabling knowledge sharing with Wikimedia. This is not an election, it’s a company, non-profit or for-profit doesn’t really matter. There are still people paying off business expenses from your donations.

    I fully understand the necessity of this, but you might just feel better if your $5 literally bought someone a meal or if it paid for a fraction of a business flight to promote Wikimedia.


  • I do give in small streams and I do large annual contributions. I’m entirely not opposed to sharing.

    I prefer to keep the small donations to individuals who also prefer a reliable stream of goodwill. Larger organizations also prefer reliable streams, but they also receive millions in donations overall, usually with significant large donors.

    If you look long enough, you’ll find enough material to not want to contribute to Wikimedia. If your contribution was only a drop in the pool to begin with, maybe this is one of the expenses that is not for you to carry.



  • Makes sense. If you’re contributing less than $1000 monthly to anything, you’re not making a difference. If you want dedicated people to be on the receiving end, who also do a great job, every single person will cost thousands each month. Wikimedia is literally spending millions each year.

    Honestly, don’t try to hunt for the “best” spot to contribute your exact amount of spare money to, with the hope of having the largest possible impact. It won’t happen. Treat a good friend to some food instead.

    If you really feel like you already got some value out of a service in the past, give what you can, without limiting yourself financially in the process. If you feel like you don’t have the $1 to spend for Wikipedia, don’t spend it. Don’t guilt trip yourself into donations ever. Your donation today will not prevent a service from turning into shit tomorrow. Pay for what you got


  • I’ve been a funding member of the Wikimedia Foundation for over a decade. I have looked at their finances several times before and during financing them.

    As with a lot of similar non-profits, a considerable amount of donations does not go into “running the servers”. You have to judge this by yourself, but they don’t embezzle any money and there is a reasonable bottom line. Wikipedia continuously helps tons of people, and the people who run the operation enable that.

    You can download a full dump of Wikipedia any day. Compared to other lying companies, they have been true on their promises for some time.

    Of all the $1 I could spend in a year, the one I give to Wikipedia is probably the least wrong invested, and that $1 actually already makes a difference