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A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

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Risks of self-hosting a public-facing forum? (lemmy.radio)

submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I've wanted to do this for a long time. My current ADHD hyperfixation is NodeBB, but I think my questions fit most anything that you want to be available to the general public and not just yourself and your friends.

Basically, I want to host a NodeBB instance intended for the general public out of my house. What are the risks of doing this? In particular, what are the risks of doling out a web address that points to my personal IP address? Is this even a good idea? Or should I just rent a VPS? This is 80% me wanting to improve my sysadmin skills, and 20% me wanting to create a community.

I have a DMZ in place. Hosts in the DMZ cannot reach the LAN, but LAN hosts can reach the DMZ. If necessary, I can make sure DMZ hosts can't communicate with each other.

I have synchronous 1 Gb fiber internet. Based on the user traffic of similar forums, I don't anticipate a crush of people.

I know the basics of how to set up a NodeBB instance, and I've successfully backed up and restored an instance on another machine.

I'm not 100% on things like HTTPS certs. I can paste a certbot command from a tutorial, that's it.

Anything else I should know? Thanks!

EDIT:

I also have a domain, a couple of them, actually. They're like potato chips; you can't stop at just one.

I don't plan on self-hosting email used for forum registration and announcements. I'm not a masochist.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago

Hosting for yourself so you can access your content outside your home is usually the use-case, use WireGuard for that though (checkout headscale) along with virtualization, VLANs, etc.
Hosting for a group of friends and/or family can usually be ok, assuming that is a well known and restrict group.

Hosting for the general public from home is usually not recommended, use a VPS for that. Bear in mind you'll likely be liable for what you host, one way or the other, depending on your jurisdiction.
If you store content (files others may upload like movies and photos) you may be responsible for that (i.e. is that content legal in your jurisdiction?).
There may be a legal distinction between the server's geographic location and the entity responsible for it - but in your case it's the same, so, again, beware.
Just linking to content deemed illegal may get you into trouble.
Putting the site behind a login-only page and vetting account creation could mitigate (or exponentiate) this.
Anyway IANAL.

What do you want to host and for whom?