TIL SimpeLogin has limits for how many accounts you can make for a single site : privacy

[–] [email protected] 121 points 2 months ago (2 children)

The purpose of these kinds of aliases is to disassociate the human's email address from the service. Alias services like this aren't designed to enable multiple signups for a single service. Otherwise it would quickly be a tool abused by spammers, blocked by services, and useless for people.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago

I completely agree and I would like to add one more thing. The way simple login responded to this issue was very nice. They could have been a whole lot more aggressive about this.

[+] [email protected] -16 points 2 months ago (3 children)

So I can't even use two different Lemmy accounts on different instances? Or have a public social media account and a 'business' one I use to share my own music or something? My dual-boxing MMO accounts? There's a lot of use cases for 2 emails/accounts at the very least.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 2 months ago (1 children)

different Lemmy accounts on different instances?

Those are different websites though.

[+] [email protected] -19 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Technically true but they belong to the same 'service' and because of the vague policy, I dont know whether that means they'd suddenly terminate my account.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago

Lemmy does not offer any sort of SSO so I wouldn't worry about it.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

Lemmy is not a service or “instance” on its own, it is a software that works with itself on different computers, as well as other Activitypub softwares.

You don’t seem to know how the Fediverse and Lemmy works, so please read on.

Really long

Each instance is running Lemmy on different (hopefully their own) computers.

They can say what the user can and can’t do on their instances because they are in charge of the computers (or have permission to do so on someone else’s computer).

Most instances have different rules.

For example, there are instances that allow extreme political opinions and others don’t.

Same goes for NSFW and other content.

The most important part of the Fediverse (the group of instances that can work together) is that it is made up of many instances that can work together fairly well [^1], so that users don’t have to use the same instance to talk to each other.

By your logic, the provider should be able to kick you off of every website that uses a certain server software (e.g. Apache, Wordpress, Mediawiki, etc).

Of course, this is not how it works.

Your comment shows the Fediverse works, because you thought it was the same service or instance.

Technologies like eMail, the WWW, and RSS also work like this, and the Fediverse is simply a natural continuation of these technologies.

The problem of the WWW is that the first big commercial instances[^2] cannot easily send data to and from each other.

This meant that the later users had to join one of the big commercial instances because everyone they knew posted in these instances and some commercial instances even stopped you from being able to see anything on the instance without an account on the instance.

The big commercial instances’ owners would do evil things like make you see things that agree with you so you spend more time on them.

The Fediverse fixes this problem by having a common language[^3] that the instances speak, called ActivityPub.

ActivityPub’s special power is that any user on any instance that speaks ActivityPub can talk to any other user on any other instance that also speaks ActivityPub as long as the instances are willing to talk to each other[^4].

If a federated instance did evil things to its users, the users can switch to a less evil instance and still be able to talk to everyone they talked to.

Some big commercial instances show off that they talk ActivityPub, but most people on the fediverse don’t trust them as corporations are not your friends.

You should really consider searching online before replying to a topic you aren’t 100% on.

Thank you for reading.

[^1]: Works together less well across softwares, YMMV.

[^2]: As of writing, most users still have accounts on them.

[^3]: There are other languages but no one really cares about them.

[^4]: There are certain forbidden instances that most other instances don’t talk to.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

I don't know what the limit is, but I have about 7 reddit accounts.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Or have a public social media account and a 'business' one I use to share my own music or something? My dual-boxing MMO accounts?

Wanna bet that you are already breaking TOS with both of these things? And I don't mean SimpleLogins TOS, but the one of the social media platform and MMO. Most big platforms only allow one account per user, no matter how the account is used. Sometimes you can create a business account, but that's still linked to your private one. Same goes for pretty much any online game, you are limited to one account per person.

I don't think that there is any sense behind these limitations, but simplelogin isn't concerned about that, they only care about the legality of your actions and limit their service accordingly.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

You won't find any sense behind it except data harvesting. They want all your info in one place, that's the end of the story.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

I find it interesting that Proton's other alias solution doesn't even know what domain aliases are used for. That information shouldn't be necessary.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

I do sometimes use it to create multiple accounts, but never more than two.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Paid or free?

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 months ago (1 children)

SimpleLogin premium, with their domain. But I can't blame them for not wanting to ruin the simplelogin.com domain

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I wonder if that's the case for custom domains as well.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

It's trivial to figure out who is proxying your email, so I would assume yes.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

If you have your own domain and need to create dozens of aliases for the same website, just self-host SimpleLogin.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Email is one of the services I will never self host.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I don't self-host my primary mail server either, but it's fine for my aliases (I use self-hosted addy.io but SimpleLogin can also be self-hosted). I use PGP to encrypt everything on my addy.io instance, and only decrypt it in my email client.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

You should still be able to bypass the email requirement when creating a Reddit account, right? The only useful purpose I see behind it for the user is if you forget your password.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Yeah, you don't need an email to make a Reddit account. If new Reddit complains use old Reddit.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

How did they find out???
Alias description? Inbox headers?

[+] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

Now head over to Erin.email and make an account with every simple login alias you have ever made

[+] [email protected] -10 points 2 months ago (2 children)

wtf this better not be true for paid customers cause that defeats the point of aliases

[–] [email protected] 41 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It makes sense to have some kind of limit to prevent abuse, otherwise Reddit (or other sites) may be forced to ban the SimpleLogin domain if it becomes a source of spam. It would be similar from an email provider preventing you from sending spam from their domain.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

I forget that I use a custom domain for simplelogin so this doesnt really apply to me unless I do it hundreds of times

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

This is on my paid account.

Privacy

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Some Rules

Related communities

Chat rooms