Online safety, comfy box, and you

If you are at all familiar with self-hosted Internet communities and forums, you should be well aware that one of the largest contributing factors to their decline over the years is that they get hacked all the fucking time. If you've been a member of other forums in the past, have i been pwned? will likely return a one or a few forum data breaches that affect you.

Many internet forums are maintained usually by a small group of people, or even just a single person. Most forum admins are not trained sysadmins, and most likely do not have formal education regarding computers, networking, or cybersecurity. comfy box is no exception, and you should consider this when using the site, as well as any other small Internet communities you may discover, like Fediverse servers or IRC or whatever.

When you register on comfy box, or any other Internet community, you should:

• Use an e-mail address that is not tied to your real world identity. Don't use your personal Gmail, a work or school e-mail, or any shit like that. It is easy to dox someone with their Gmail address. Use an alternative private e-mail address, ideally on a privacy-conscious e-mail provider. Here's a list, but there are many more providers worth looking into.
• Consider using a username that you haven't used elsewhere. It is easy to search the same or similar usernames across multiple websites. Re-using a username across multiple platforms is an easy way to fuck yourself, and create a digital footprint that will come back to haunt you.
• Do not use a password that you have used elsewhere. I shouldn't even have to say this shit. I should not be able to find the passwords of my fucking users in other data breaches from other sites. yet here we are.
• Consider using a VPN or proxy. A VPN hides your traffic from your ISP, and hides your IP address from the services you use. The default behavior of every web server software is to log the IP address alongside every request, and you should think about what this means for your privacy.

When you register an account on comfy box with your real-life personal Gmail address, and a username that you use literally on every other platform, you are putting both your online, and potentially real-world safety and privacy into the hands of a severely mentally ill autistic gay furry. You should not trust a severely mentally ill autistic gay furry to safely keep information that could potentially identify you personally.

I've put a lot of effort into learning how to secure my shit, but nothing that is exposed to the public Internet is ever 100% safe. You should take your online safety into your own hands, instead of depending on the administrators of services you use to keep your information safe.