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A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

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[Question] VPN use to keep my instance from pinpointing my house? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I want to set up a lemmy instance as a subreddit alternative for a community I moderate. I would be running the instance on a local machine in my home so I really want to make sure that it can't be traced to my physical location.

I already subscribe to ExpressVPN for general use, can I just install it on the local machine, press connect, and boom be anonymous? What impact would this have on users?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I think you can do it but you'll probably need port forwarding on the VPN.

Unfortunately Mullvad just cancelled this feature.

Alternatively you can run your own VPN with a VPS (and use it like a reverse proxy), then you can easily control the port forwarding.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Alternatively you can run your own VPN with a VPS (and use it like a reverse proxy), then you can easily control the port forwarding.

This latter part, please forgive me as this is the first time I'm looking into hosting a web service. My plan was to purchase a domain with Google, which would include WHOIS privacy. Is this what you're referring to here?

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

No, I mean have an external server (ideally with a static IP address) and point the domain to that. And then have your local machine (hosting Lemmy) connect to that server and reverse-proxy the Lemmy port.

I haven't tried it with Lemmy so I'm not 100% sure the domain settings in Lemmy would work with this setup (since the domain wouldn't resolve to your local machine where it's actually running, and maybe Lemmy depends on that). But the idea is external users would just see the VPS, and have no idea that it's actually served from your local machine over a reverse proxy there.

You'd have to pay for VPS traffic though, but aside from that it wouldn't need much hardware, so should be cheap.

But you might also want to re-consider running it locally at all in this case. If the instance is small, it might work out just the same just to host it directly in the cloud. And then you can set up automatic setup and migration with Terraform / CDK ,etc.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Alright, thank you for your help!