State of the Instance (November 2021)
Sorry for the delay. But hey, it's still November!
I don't have much to tell you anyway... although there's a few things.
GoDaddy and the future of .club
When I bought cawfee.club at the start of 2019, the .club TLD (top-level domain) was managed by its own company, .Club Domains, LLC. However, in April 2019, the TLD was sold off to GoDaddy, a long-running domain registrar that - among other things - dabbles in webhosting and, as of recently, managing TLDs.
This concerns me deeply. GoDaddy has a terrible track record regarding security and service availability. Just this week, their managed WordPress sites had a massive security breach. Now, granted, I don't think there's much security risk with GoDaddy being just the manager of your TLD, compared to them hosting your site. Nevertheless, the TLD nameservers play a part in resolving a domain name to its IP address, which is why they're a critical part of infrastructure for any website - a part you don't have control of. And this October, there was already one such incident regarding the .club TLD when its nameservers went down and as a result, the entirety of .club was unreachable for several hours.
Moreover, this acquisition gives GoDaddy the ability to suspend .club domains. GoDaddy has already deplatformed several sites they hosted and something similar has recently happened to a few Fediverse instances, namely neckbeard.xyz, so the distant possibility that something similar could happen to cawfee.club is one of my concerns. Unfortunately, since the instance is forever tied to its domain name, a simple migration to another domain is not an option. But make no mistake, I will continue to run cawfee.club for as long as possible.
A change in ban reporting policy
Starting today, I will no longer be documenting deletion of common advertisement spam accounts on the ban page. (You know, the kind that forms most of the list.) Originally I wanted to log every single ban for the sake of transparency, but every time such an account appears, it takes me a few minutes to make an entry and I've come to accept the fact that nobody cares about generic spam being deleted anyway.
The possibility of password recovery via email
Currently I'm learning some details of setting up and managing an email server in school. I've never worked with email before so it's a bit overwhelming, but once I get a firm grasp on it, I might set up a mail server with the sole purpose of handling password resets for cawfee.club. This would of course require that you have a valid email address set in your profile, so you might as well make sure of that. :)
uhhh emoggers
(I plundered another friend's Discord server. I'm running out of servers with good emoji for this.)
