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Comment by mholt | Hacker News Reader

Awesome! Why did you choose Caddy as a proxy for PDS? (Caddy creator here.)

Thanks for Caddy, Matt! Some of us on the team have been using Caddy for years, for many of our projects. Because it's so simple, sufficiently high performance, and has lots of nice features.

The on-demand TLS certificates with an "ask" endpoint is especially useful for the PDS use-case. Because there's generally a wildcard DNS name that is used to give each new user a domain handle (@alice.example.com) but we don't want to be vulnerable to a TLS certificate DoS/rate limit situation.

Great reasons -- glad to hear that! Let me know if you encounter any hiccups or have feedback.

Love the fresh federated model btw!

Even if it may be simple in some areas, it doesn't handle edge cases such as https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/issues/1632 in other areas out of the box unlike other server software.

Not for nothing, but when accessed from this HN app on an iPhone, Apple’s website with a trailing dot does not render correctly.

you have been repeatedly posting this incredibly niche complaint for years at this point

I have only brought this up once before on HN and it was over 2 years ago. Not adopting a new project because it is missing something niche is an extremely common reason why people stick with tried and true, mature software. I do not see anything wrong with pointing out niche issues because to some people these issues are important. Because it's broken out of the box it is allowing people who aren't aware of this problem to continue to setup broken sites. Even caddyserver.com. is broken.

Curious. What is the use case here? I’ve spent tens of thousands of hours of my life on the Internet and a lot of that as a sysadm and I’ve not once heard of people accessing or linking to sites this way.

Personally, I just want to properly handle this edge case and it would bother me if my sites didn't handle it correctly. There are advantages for using FQDNs since they are not ambiguous there are extra optimizations that can be done. I don't want my sites to be problematic for people who want to use them so I make sure my sites properly handle them. Usually handling FQDNs is easy as it just works out if the box on most server software.

Can you provide a URL to a page containing a link of this style? I’ll concede that it’s useful to someone if I see it! The term ‘FQDN’ does not always imply the dot at the end?

Do you just want a link?

https://news.ycombinator.com./

If you want a link to a page with a link like this you can click on the github issue I referenced in my original comment as there are links there like that.

If you want a more natural page that is less meta with such a link

https://jameswillia.ms/posts/shortest-urls.html

>Also, the term ‘FQDN’ does not always imply the dot at the end?

Yes, but if there is not a . at the end then there is ambiguity of if it is a FQDN or not.

Is it possible you're vonfusing that user with me? I used to be relatively vocal about this issue on HN. For reference, that's not me.

And it's probably not niche if dozens of users are posting about it for years.

That is a bit unfair, as it is intentionally not doing so. You may disagree with it, sure, but as it stands I think your comment implies oversight or immaturity, which is evidently not the case reading the discussion on the issue you linked.

>That is a bit unfair, as it is intentionally not doing so.

That doesn't change my point. I am pointing out a an easy pitfall Caddy users can fall in since it is not automatically handled for them as it is with other server software, nor is it pointed out in the documentation fkr Caddy. Simple server software would avoid these pitfalls automatically for users. So while it now be simple to get https working, properly configuring the server is now more complex to get right.

An intentional pitfall doesn't mean it isn't a pitfall.

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