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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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Want to selfhost a Lemmy server (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/selfhosted

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Hey. I really like the idea of the fediverse and Lemmy and would want to know as a beginner/not so experienced regarding selfhosting what would be the best way to get started? I saw there are vps options, but don't know of I'm looking in the right direction.

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

i’ve decided against hosting lemmy at home because there’s no way to setup a proxy for outbound connections (or i couldn’t find it) so any federation request your lemmy instance makes reveals your home IP to owners of that particular instance.

Wait, how would that work? If I'm using OpenVPN, would it not be using the source and/or destination IP as my OpenVPN client IP, and not my home IP? After all, OpenVPN is completely bypassing my routing and NAT from my home connection, and it just tunnels traffic through the VPN instead.

I believe the source IP would be the IP of any server trying to contact my server, and then the destination IP would be my VPN client IP because of the DNAT rule I have on my VPN server (say 10.0.0.2) so it would not expose my home IP, or is that not correct? If both Lemmy and Nginx are either using a local docker IP (not on my home network) or the OpenVPN client IP from tun0, how would they even be aware of my home IP which would be on a separate network interface?

Are you saying I'd be exposing my IP if I tried my home-based VPN port forwarded setup? I am pretty sure it wouldn't be exposing my home IP, but maybe I am mistaken.

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

if you pass all outbound connections through vpn you'll be fine.

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

Good to know, thanks!

I also asked ChatGPT because I was curious, and ChatGPT said since I am using a VPN, when my home server makes outbound requests, they will first go through the VPN tunnel and emerge from the VPS which means that to external systems (like the servers receiving my federation requests), the source IP will appear to be the public IP of my VPS, not my home IP.

Very cool stuff! It makes sense that VPNs can be used to mask home IPs even in this way, since VPNs are literally designed for security and privacy lol