I recently got my hands on a lightly used Raspberry Pi 5 and have been playing around with it and breaking things while trying to learn my way around self hosting. I have a a couple questions now that I’ve hit a bit of a road block in learning.
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Is it possible to set up lemmy for local host on a local network only? I’m not worried about federated data from other instances. At this point I just want to experiment and break things before I commit to buying a Top Level Domain name.
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How exactly does a TLD work? I’ve tried searching up how to redirect traffic from a TLD to my raspberry pi. Since I don’t know much about hosting or networking, I don’t know what to search up to find the answer I’m looking for.
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How do I protect myself while self hosting? I know the Lemmy documentation suggests using Let’s Encrypt, is that all I need to do in order to protect any private data being used?
My goal in the future is to have a local, text-only instance that may connect with a small number of whitelisted instances.
You need to make sure you get a unique public IP from your home ISP. Some utilize a so called CGNAT which allows them to share one IP with multiple customers, but this makes self-hosting from home much more difficult. Less bad is a so called dynamic IP, which is unique but can change randomly. For that you need some system to automatically update your DNS records when a IP change is detected.
And yes, the domain registrar and dns server operator has an webinterface to associated your public IP with the domain name. The better and larger ones also provide an API to automate it should your public IP change.
There are many things you can do to improve security, but mostly you should run a firewall to not expose any internal services to the public internet.