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?
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.
Don’t worry, this is not possible. I just checked with different IP location finders. One got a completely wrong area, the other one found the nearest larger city.
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.
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?
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.
Most people use cloudflares free proxy service and a fully qualified domain name that they own.
You could also set up a virtual private server on a host provider like linode or digital ocean and install a point to point vpn as your egress/ingress point.
You can get a couple of free VPSs with Oracle no credit card required as well. I’ve heard some people say theirs were shut down and I read somewhere that they may do if usage falls below a certain amount - I guess cause they’re considered dormant. I’ve never had a problem.
