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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 (2 children)

If I'm not mistaken to make your instance available to other people you'd have to set up a reverse proxy. And a correctly set up reverse proxy shouldn't reveal your IP, only the local IP (127.0.0.1).

I might be wrong, so ask on the [email protected], since it's more active than this community.

However renting a VPS and hosting your Lemmy instance there is probably a better idea if you plan on creating a community, since it will minimize risks (DMCA notices, bugs in the Lemmy source code that could expose your server, etc). And it would make scaling easier if your instance grows.

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

If I'm not mistaken to make your instance available to other people you'd have to set up a reverse proxy. And a correctly set up reverse proxy shouldn't reveal your IP, only the local IP (127.0.0.1).

This is incorrect. The reverse proxy only handles the internal routing, so if you're not tunneling, or otherwise obfuscating your IP, selfhosting websites exposes your IP address.

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

If I’m not mistaken to make your instance available to other people you’d have to set up a reverse proxy. And a correctly set up reverse proxy shouldn’t reveal your IP, only the local IP (127.0.0.1).

Thank you for this information, if this is correct it sounds like this isn't something I need to worry about then.