I want to set up a lemmy instance as a subreddit alternative for a community I moderate. I would be running the instance on a local machine in my home so I really want to make sure that it can’t be traced to my physical location.
I already subscribe to ExpressVPN for general use, can I just install it on the local machine, press connect, and boom be anonymous? What impact would this have on users?
I think you can do it but you’ll probably need port forwarding on the VPN.
Unfortunately Mullvad just cancelled this feature.
Alternatively you can run your own VPN with a VPS (and use it like a reverse proxy), then you can easily control the port forwarding.
For all my self hosted stuff I use nginx proxy manager behind a cloudflare tunnel. The tunnel connects to a container on the machine which sends everything to the reverse proxy. no need for vpn or port forwarding
This is the only correct answer, the other responses about only showing local ip, and hosting something that goes through a VPN are either wrong or don’t result in a working configuration. A domain must resolve to an IP so connecting out via a VPN just won’t work. Proxying your connection through cloudflare using cloudflareD tunnels is the answer. Users will only see the ip of cloudflare.
I don’t think that’ll work, they likely don’t allow inbound connections to their VPN endpoints.
There are a couple options:
- Use Cloudflare Tunnels (Free)
- Use a small VPS from a company like DigitalOcean to run a site-to-site WireGuard VPN + reverse proxy
- Use a small/medium VPS from a company like DigitalOcean to host your Lemmy instance
Note: I haven’t done a review of the traffic to confirm if option one or two will leak your IP (it shouldn’t, that’s generally a problem with WebRTC), but it is a potential concern. I do use option 1 currently. Note that tunnels are limited to 100mb file uploads, but iirc there is a bug in Lemmy that effectively limits uploads to 20mb.
At best a reverse IP search can show the general area, no way someone can pin-point your house with it.
