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.
Sure, you’d need a domain name, a certificate, an IP address that’s reachable from the outside, and the RasPi or some other computer.
If it’s some residential internet connection, you might be able to open up a port and forward that to your RasPi. You’d need to do that in the internet router. Port 80 and 443 are for HTTP(S). (protocol: TCP). Some internet providers don’t allow any of that.
Your IP address will change with most regular internet providers, so you’d want to buy your domain name somewhere you can change it automatically with a script. Or use DynDNS. duckdns.org would be one of those DynDNS providers.
If your internet service provider doesn’t allow incoming connections and port forwards, you need to work around that. Use Cloudflare, or better, some better tunnel provider.
Free certificates for HTTPS are available from letsencrypt.
And if it turns out Lemmy is too heavy on the Raspberry Pi, try PieFed instead.
I checked the router settings and there seems to be a setting specifically for Dynamic DNS Client. There’s three options included with DynDNS, NoIP and DtDNS. NoIP says it’s free so I will probably use that service.
I’m going to assume having that setting there is a good sign for me and what I want to do. Possibly reduce some potential headaches.
I’ll consider PieFed in the future as well. It does have some features and ideas overall that seem appealing to me. One thing at a time though.
Nice. Hope it does the port forward as well, because in my experience that’s the part where you could face some issues. DynDNS is relatively easy, in case your router hadn’t supported this, it’d be possible to let the Pi handle that.
The modem/router also handles port forwarding which has been pretty common on all the modem/routers I’ve used in the past. Didn’t even register that as a concern haha.
That’s good to know the Pi can handle DynDNS as well. Would be nice to keep all that information contained to one device, simply for my sanity.
I think the package “ddclient” is the most common DynDNS client. Should be available on almost any Linux distribution and handle most providers. Take one of the ones you found. Or afraid.org , desec.io , duckdns.org
I’m not really up to date any more, so I’m not 100% sure. I’m paying like 6€ a year for a regular domain I properly own.