I like to update my list of IP Addresses every so often for pages I visit regularly. The DNS Server for our region went down for two days and it was so much easier feeding an ip address to relatives trying to connect than having them switch DNS Servers. Not to mention Hackers/Government Redirects of DNS servers.
Not sure how this would work with pods and such but
I would like to suggest that you IP address actually load you home page instead of a host page. [For all I know this may work with other pods but I use diasp.org]
Given we encourage many small pods, that we ran out of IPv4 address space and that communicating an IPv6 address is not that much easier either, I don’t think we as a project should encourage this, sorry. It’s just not viable anymore these days for any single service to be the primary or only service on a IPv4 address’ port 443/80. I think this might also send a wrong signal since it might jeopardize emergent technologies such as DNSSEC and DANE which should actually be beneficial in those situations.
It might be worth to just once go through the effort of converting your friends and family to use alternative nameservers such as OpenDNS.
Let me close with the plead to not advertise diaspora* as a tool to combat state censorship or surveillance. diaspora* was designed and built to defeat corporate exploitation of data, everything else is just side effects and not well supported. Please rely on proven technologies such as PGP, OMEMO, OpenVPN etc. if you’re under a restrictive government.
Yeah I use OpenDNS, switching relatives over would become a full time job, a job that I have worked hard not to be associated with. That is why when they call I gave them the straight IP address.
Oh well thanks, I will just have to tell them to suck it up next time.
As for the govt redirect part after reading up more I realized the govt made the same/similar misunderstanding about IP’s I did here, they redirected a IP which took out every site from the IP host, not just the offender. Should not be happening too often, hopefully.