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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] 2 points 2 days ago

I have dynamic dns through cloudflare that provides a proxy ip address for me in addition to some protections.

After that I use a reverse proxy to route specific domain names to services. My router is set up to forward only ports 80 and 443 to that reverse proxy, so there's a good layer of safety there. There could be a weakness on the router, but at this point traffic is pretty limited.

After that, at least for your service, if you can have some control or throttling of signings and be more selective about who you let in, then that could help.

I say do it. Sure there's risk someone could put something on there you don't want, but I wouldn't say it's big enough to not do it.