Selfhosted @lemmy.world Octopus @thelemmy.club 7 mo. ago

[SOLVED] Can I host my own Lemmy instance on localhost?

Would it be possible for me to make comments to other instances etc?

Solved: I can't, it would only work with a public domain.

27 comments

No, ActivityPub is a push protocol. Other instances send data to your instance via HTTPS and only HTTPS. So you need at minimum a public domain and web server with TLS enabled.

Some people use Cloudflare tunnels to avoid opening ports or just get a cheap VPS to forward the traffic home without exposing the home IP.
- You do realize all this is easily done with a reverse proxy + DuckDNS?
  
  Wouldn't you need a publically available IP? DuckDNS is only for dynamic IP's that is public, yes?
- Why not HTTP :c
  
  Data send via HTTP is not encrypted. That's bad.
  
  Plain HTTP should be considered obsolete. Also it makes impersonating websites harder (but not impossible)
I don't know enough about ActivityPub to say for sure but I believe that in order to federate properly (grab posts and comments from other servers as well as sending posts and comments to other servers) you need to have a publicly accessible domain with SSL. Hosting on localhost ( the computer you want to access from) is pointless if you don't have a reverse proxy set up to actually let others see your server online.
Depends on what you mean by "localhost". Localhost is just the computer you're currently logged in / sitting in front of... But I don't know what kind of computer that is and how it is connected to the internet.

You'd need a webserver that is reachable from the internet to be able to have a Lemmy instance that can interact with other parts of the network. The webserver itself can run on any machine. You just need to make it accessible from the internet. So you either have a connection to the internet that allows hosting stuff... Use port forwarding in your router (at home) or if that's all not available use a tunnel or VPN.

I really don't know were you're trying to get... If your question is: Can I selfhost stuff from a domestic internet connection: The answer is: Probably. Depends a bit on the provider and setup.

If your question is: Do I need a domain name? The answer is: Probably yes if your (external) IP address changes frequently.
yes its possible. can you do it? dunno, it can get complex.

that youre asking here means no, you cannot.
Each instance is available on someone's localhost.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters	More Letters
CGNAT	Carrier-Grade NAT
DNS	Domain Name Service/System
HTTP	Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web
HTTPS	HTTP over SSL
IP	Internet Protocol
NAT	Network Address Translation
SSL	Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption
TLS	Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL
VPN	Virtual Private Network
VPS	Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)

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Watch out for all the hackers there!

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