I’m reading up on self-hosting Lemmy, and I was planning on creating my own private instance for individual use on some spare Azure ASP I use to host private FreshRSS (not rich to host a public service).

This basically shuts my idea down, because I wanted to simply host my account myself and browse all of Lemmy as I please.

So is everyone hosting individual instances dealing with them being public? is there a workaround to avoid having a public service that anyone can see?

  • chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net
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    1 year ago

    What is your definition of private?

    You can disable registration (so you’re the only user and thus no one other than you can subscribe anything). You can simply not create communities on your instance (and thus no one can post anything). You can federate per normal and still browse anywhere you’d please.

    Would that achieve what you’re looking for?

    • Durotar@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      If you click on the link:

      Use case: I run a single user instance where I don’t create any of my own communities but I subscribe to and interact with a variety of communities on other instances. By making my instance non-private, everyone on the Internet can browse to it and see every remote community I’ve looked at which seems pretty bad for privacy.

  • RoundSparrow@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    This basically shuts my idea down

    it’s not very difficult to modify the code for something like this… and closing off registration wont’ let anyone else login and create new content form your istance.

    Personally the load on the major servers by having one more instance that subscribes to everything is why I think people should back off from creating more than the 1500 instances Lemmy network already has. Delivery of every single vote, comment, post 24 hours a day just so one person can read content for an hour or two a day.

    That makes sense for email systems where all that content doesn’t have to be sent, but for Lemmy it’s a huge amount of overhead.

  • stown@sedd.it
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    1 year ago

    Private in this context means that it is isolated. If you want it to be private in the sense that it’s only for you to use the you just close registrations.

    Anonymity and federation are kind of oxymoronic.

  • poVoq@slrpnk.net
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    1 year ago

    The federation/API end point and the web-ui are entirely independent.

    If you want, you can run the federated backend with no web ui at all and use it via mobile apps only.

    Or you could put some password protection via the webserver in front of the web ui only.

  • REdOG@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I used a $2/mth vps and got an instance up in about 5 minutes with ansible. Took longer to pay for the instance and ssh into it than the Lemmy install

    If I were worried about it gaining users then I’d just limit access to the UI or do some database maintenance