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?

  • jaxA
    1·
    2 years ago

    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.