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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No, ActivityPub is a push protocol. Other instances send data to your instance via HTTPS and only HTTPS. So you need at minimum a public domain and web server with TLS enabled.
Some people use Cloudflare tunnels to avoid opening ports or just get a cheap VPS to forward the traffic home without exposing the home IP.
You do realize all this is easily done with a reverse proxy + DuckDNS?
Wouldn't you need a publically available IP? DuckDNS is only for dynamic IP's that is public, yes?
Duckdns is pretty much a service that offers free domain names.. that could point to any public IP. (I have seen setups where local IPs are used just for HTTPS). So its good for instances as HTTPS can be achieved without buying domain name.
Works with anything that can open ports. DuckDNS works by pinging their service from anywhere to update the target IP for the subdomain.
Doesn't work if you are on CGNAT
See: Anything that can open ports. NAT of any kind tends to not allow opening ports.
Absolutely. However I feel like the whole thread needs extra clarification, considering the question OP posed.
Dynamic DNS isn't a magic wand in the way a Reverse Proxy over VPN is.
Yea, that is also what I thought. To bypass this, you would need something like Cloudflare Tunnels or setup a VPN on a VPS, that redirects traffic to your homeserver.
Why not HTTP :c
Data send via HTTP is not encrypted. That's bad.
I want it encrypted but I don't want to ask a 3rd party to get a certificate.
Letsencrypt provides free certificates. It's very easy to get one from them.
If they're easy to get, why have them 😑
I'm not sure I understand the question. They are used to encrypt traffic and prove that the entity hosting the site hasn't changed by using a digital signature. These two together make it so third parties can't read the traffic coming through. This is a requirement for modern internet. Otherwise your passwords wouldn't be a secret because literally anyone would see them.
Because then you can encrypt your traffic with HTTPS 🙃
This is madness 🤯
Plain HTTP should be considered obsolete. Also it makes impersonating websites harder (but not impossible)
Additionally, HTTPS if very easy to set up nowadays and the certificates are free^1^.
^1^: Assuming you have a public domain name, but for ActivityPub that's already a requirement due to the push nature of the protocol.
You can get Let's Encrypt certificates for DuckDNS, so you don't even need to own anything.
yes its possible. can you do it? dunno, it can get complex.
that youre asking here means no, you cannot.
I don't know enough about ActivityPub to say for sure but I believe that in order to federate properly (grab posts and comments from other servers as well as sending posts and comments to other servers) you need to have a publicly accessible domain with SSL. Hosting on localhost ( the computer you want to access from) is pointless if you don't have a reverse proxy set up to actually let others see your server online.
Depends on what you mean by "localhost". Localhost is just the computer you're currently logged in / sitting in front of... But I don't know what kind of computer that is and how it is connected to the internet.
You'd need a webserver that is reachable from the internet to be able to have a Lemmy instance that can interact with other parts of the network. The webserver itself can run on any machine. You just need to make it accessible from the internet. So you either have a connection to the internet that allows hosting stuff... Use port forwarding in your router (at home) or if that's all not available use a tunnel or VPN.
I really don't know were you're trying to get... If your question is: Can I selfhost stuff from a domestic internet connection: The answer is: Probably. Depends a bit on the provider and setup.
If your question is: Do I need a domain name? The answer is: Probably yes if your (external) IP address changes frequently.
Each instance is available on someone's localhost.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| CGNAT | Carrier-Grade NAT |
| DNS | Domain Name Service/System |
| HTTP | Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web |
| HTTPS | HTTP over SSL |
| IP | Internet Protocol |
| NAT | Network Address Translation |
| SSL | Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption |
| TLS | Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL |
| VPN | Virtual Private Network |
| VPS | Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) |
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