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.

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  • megaman
    1·
    17 hours ago

    A “TLD” is a Top-level Domain, examples of which are .com and .org. They sell names within their domains.

    You’d just be buying a “domain name” within some TLD and redirecting traffic from that domain name, not from the TLD.