Who benefits from this? Even though Let’s Encrypt stresses that most site operators will do fine sticking with ordinary domain certificates, there are still scenarios where a numeric identifier is the only practical choice:

Infrastructure services such as DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) – where clients may pin a literal IP address for performance or censorship-evasion reasons.
IoT and home-lab devices – think network-attached storage boxes, for example, living behind static WAN addresses.
Ephemeral cloud workloads – short-lived back-end servers that spin up with public IPs faster than DNS records can propagate.
    • 3abas@lemmy.world
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      15 hours ago

      Domains need to be registered annually and DNS servers are needed to route traffic to them. But using an IP directly, you don’t need to worry about domain registration issues that can brick your systems, and you don’t have to worry about DNS providers knowing about your traffic (or maintaining your own private dns).

      If it’s not a user trying in a memorable domain, an IP serves much better.

  • surph_ninja@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    This could go a long way towards fighting online censorship. One less issue when an authoritarian overreach gets your domain seized. Pretty awesome.

  • Allero@lemmy.today
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    2 days ago

    F I N A L L Y

    Now tell me it supports IPv6 and I’ll be the happiest man alive

    • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Maybe I’m not understanding it but I can’t see what I would use this for due to the 6 day issue period. Bringing a NAS up to copy data for a couple days is the only real use case I find for home users.

      Because even if you pay for a static external IP from your ISP, this doesn’t support using such for longer than that period right?

  • AliasVortex@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    That’s kind of awesome! I have a bunch of home lab stuff, but have been putting off buying a domain (I was a broke college student when I started my lab and half the point was avoiding recurring costs- plus I already run the DNS, as far as the WAN is concerned, I have whatever domain I want). My loose plan was to stand up a certificate authority and push the root public key out with active directory, but being able to certify things against Let’s Encrypt might make things significantly easier.

    • SteveTech@programming.dev
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      2 days ago

      With dynamic DNS? Yeah it always has, as long as you can host a http server.

      With a dynamic IP? It should do, the certs are only valid for 6 days for that reason.

    • AHemlocksLie@lemmy.zip
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      2 days ago

      Maybe kinda, but it’s also a third party whose certificates are almost if not entirely universally trusted. Self-signed certs cause software to complain unless you also spread a root certificate to be trusted to any machine that might use one of your self-signed certs.

    • jj4211@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      They will require the requester to prove they control the standard http(s) ports, which isn’t possible with any nat.

      It won’t work for such users, but also wouldn’t enable any sort of false claims over a shared IP.