this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2026
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Running my own fediverse instance for the people who need it the most (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by aprehendedmerlin@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
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Hi guys, I don't know if this is the right place to ask for advice about this so if I'm in the wrong place kindly show me where should I go.

With that out of the way here is my back story, I'm Iranian and as many of you guys heard in the news there are mass uprising, protests and geopolitical conflict going on here. So naturally our theocratic dictatorship leaders here decide on a whim when the whole country can have internet access to outside world or not and when they cut it off there is no safe place for people to keep in touch when we need it the most. Mostly they want to keep people in dark unaware of what's going on out there...

Here is what I thought, Can I deploy and run my own fediverse instance in this situation on VPS hosted inside the country? Me and a few of my trusted friends are the admins of a small local community of around 200 people give or take but this community can grow to 1000 roughly in future. I can be an example for my fellow countrymen here if I can others can too and many other local communities can be shaped like this inside the country... Which fediverse platform we should choose? Lemmy or piefed comes to my mind but I'm a total noob I have no background in programming. I can use LLMs for help Where should I start? Can you guys help me here. I'm a little lost all this is uncharted territory for me

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[–] aprehendedmerlin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Thanks, we need a platform somekind of a forum where we can have different communities/topics but all the content be visible in one home feed for the members of communities and crucially good moderation capabilities for the admins assigned to communities. The content is going to be both text-based and media like videos pictures etc. Currently we are on a telegram super group but that doesn't cut it and can be lost. Is piefed or Lemmy a good fit for this? I have been here since 2023 and I think it would be. One other issue is privacy the identity of the members should be protected at all costs.

[–] CameronDev@programming.dev 13 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Lemmy does allow anonymous signups, but everything is unencrypted in the database, so if the server was seized all messages, posts and DMs would be available.

[–] aprehendedmerlin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 2 days ago (3 children)

And they can find everyone when they seize the server? Are the IPs logged too?

[–] khannie@lemmy.world 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Even if you manage to keep your VPS clean as a whistle of offending logs, your VPS host can log all incoming IP addresses.

I think this is a great idea but very difficult to safely implement.

[–] aprehendedmerlin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Good point in-fact I know that many data centers here are silently instructed to do this by default. Don't know how to bypass this yet

[–] throws_lemy@lemmy.nz 1 points 1 day ago

Buy another VPS from a different country and set it up as your Fediverse/community proxy server. And limit your Fediverse/community connections to only this proxy server.

[–] hanke@feddit.nu 2 points 2 days ago

Block all traffic that does not originate from a reputable VPN or TOR exit node?

Not sure how well it would work, but it should force your users to protect themselves somewhat at least.

You'd have to get some list of valid IPs that are safe so you can whitelist those in a firewall.

[–] Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

You could probably route the logs to /dev/null but IDK if the IPs also get stored in the DB

[–] aprehendedmerlin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 days ago

The server hosting is going to log this for sure. Also there is no such thing as anonymous VPS providers here they all are obligated to check your identification before giving you anything. I'm not gonna do and allow any other members to do anything too obviously illegal on the instance itself that's just asking for it

[–] CameronDev@programming.dev 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Not within Lemmy to my knowledge, but you would have to be careful when setting it up.

[–] aprehendedmerlin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I'm gonna assume they log anything they can and base everything on that

[–] CameronDev@programming.dev 4 points 2 days ago

That is a wise assumption, best to play is safe.

[–] INeedMana@piefed.zip 1 points 2 days ago

The content is going to be both text-based and media like videos pictures etc. Currently we are on a telegram super group but that doesn’t cut it and can be lost. Is piefed or Lemmy a good fit for this? I have been here since 2023 and I think it would be. One other issue is privacy the identity of the members should be protected at all costs.

If this is only for having a place to socialize, Fedi will work

But if you want privacy, maybe check out delta chat? https://chatmail.at/doc/relay/getting_started.html
You probably will still need a domain for the relay and somewhere to run it but when used in one account mode, delta relay stores nothing on users. It only relays the messages