I recently got my hands on a lightly used Raspberry Pi 5 and have been playing around with it and breaking things while trying to learn my way around self hosting. I have a a couple questions now that I’ve hit a bit of a road block in learning.
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Is it possible to set up lemmy for local host on a local network only? I’m not worried about federated data from other instances. At this point I just want to experiment and break things before I commit to buying a Top Level Domain name.
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How exactly does a TLD work? I’ve tried searching up how to redirect traffic from a TLD to my raspberry pi. Since I don’t know much about hosting or networking, I don’t know what to search up to find the answer I’m looking for.
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How do I protect myself while self hosting? I know the Lemmy documentation suggests using Let’s Encrypt, is that all I need to do in order to protect any private data being used?
My goal in the future is to have a local, text-only instance that may connect with a small number of whitelisted instances.
Lemmy is very database write heavy once federated, so unless you get the nvme extension for your Rpi5 it will not work very well. The database is also very RAM hungry as a result.
Anyways, if it is just about testing, it should not be a problem.
Lemmy by itself should be accessible without a domain name, but federation depends on it. Just give it a try and access it via “localhost” or the local IP of the server hosting it.
A TLD is just a reference to an public IP. Basically you ask a server what IP does this name reference and that’s it.
TLS certificates (via Lets Encrypt) are necessary for participating in the federation and protect data like passwords of the users while being send to the server. It is not strictly speaking a security measure for your server.
A “TLD” is a Top-level Domain, examples of which are
.comand.org. They sell names within their domains.You’d just be buying a “domain name” within some TLD and redirecting traffic from that domain name, not from the TLD.
