cross-posted from: https://compuverse.uk/post/5020
Preamble- I’m new to the fediverse, and I want some help. I’m trying to regain some of my privacy and data sovereignty, and I have recently gotten into self-hosting. I haven’t been on social media for over a decade, except for Reddit, and that was mostly as a passive lurker. I just started getting more active on there this past year, and now they’ve turned me away with their shenanigans. I’m trying to get into federated communications to still have access to useful information while protecting my identity and data.
Goals- I’m thinking that I want to set up my own Lemmy instance, as well as my own xmpp server (like prosody), and switch over to jmp.chat. I also have my own domain.
Concerns- I want to spin up my own services so that I own my data and have greater control over my connections, and possibly have a hub that friends and family can use. However, I also don’t want to expose my domain (Why not? I don’t know. I’m completely new at this and until I learn more, I’m playing it cautious)
Questions- So, if I spin up my own Lemmy instance, doesn’t that expose my domain,since my username will be username@my-domain.com? Is this the same for an xmpp server? One main reason to spin up my own xmpp server is to own my account for xmpp communications. However, can I tie that to my jmp.chat account, or would they need to be separate.
I kind of feel like a boat without an oar at the moment, and I’m not even sure if I’m asking sensical questions, but hopefully there’s enough light in my ramblings to give you all a sense of my goals. Any help would be appreciated.
So you’re suggesting that I not set this up on the same VPS I have my nextcloud instance on, then? That makes sense. Would I basically need two completely different VPS services if I wanted to do this? One for my private services, and one for my communication services?
I recommend that you be very cautious when setting up anything that faces the internet - if there’s a vulnerability in the OS or Lemmy app, there’s a good chance it will be exploited and all federated server names are published, so you need to be prepared for that and not be devastated if your data gets stolen, wiped out or encrypted by ransomware. Back everything up regularly. If you have a personal system with any valuable data on it then I would stridently discourage you from installing Lemmy there. Use a very small dedicated server instance and give it a cute name. Lemmy runs fine for a few users on a single CPU with 1 GB of RAM. You will need around 8GB of storage initially - that’s a bare minimum. This stuff might be covered in the install guides but this is from my own experience.
If you’ve never managed a public web server before I’m not sure that starting with Lemmy is ideal for learning, but then again, you won’t learn anything by doing nothing - just be mindful about security of your own data and backing stuff up once you have the instance set up and you should be fine.