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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[โ€“] Auster@thebrainbin.org 10 points 2 days ago (1 children)

You'd be putting your life on the line, so a suggestion if you go through with this idea:

Have someone you can entrust the site to that wouldn't be targeted by the regime (at least immediately, maybe a foreigner?) in case you go MIA, or someone "suicides" you.

Also, hosting an anti-dictatorship platform fully within the borders the dictatorship controls means it could easily hunt down those hosting it. They wouldn't need to pick leaves one by one if they chop the whole tree down, in an analogy. From what I follow of news about Iran, its regime appears to be more immediately an enemy of the US, Israel, Lebanon and Russia, and the EU governments appear to be shifting to be openly against it, so maybe worth looking for VPS providers aligned with those countries, I'd think.

Also, people often use Telegram, but internet being cut makes it somewhat unreliable. Alternatively, what P2P or other portable relay technologies are there, so that even if the origin of the network disappears or internet is cut, it keeps floating around? I can only think of amateur radio broadcast, similar to how Poles did in the Iron Curtain time, but similarly to there back then, you'd need to be on the run after each short broadcast, so you're not easily found.

[โ€“] aprehendedmerlin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 2 days ago

Thank you you are genuinely concerned that warms my heart. Yes hostings here are obligated to log everything they can by default. As I said in other comment threads I'm not gonna do or allow others to do anything obviously too illegal on my instance it's mostly for my friends and gonna keep it somewhat private and closed. That stuff gonna take place somewhere else when the time comes