this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2026
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Selfhosted

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I find the idea of self-hosting to be really appealing, but at the same time I find it to be incredibly scary. This is not because I lack the technical expertise, but because I have gotten the impression that everyone on the Internet would immediately try to hack into it to make it join their bot net. As a result, I would have to be constantly vigilant against this, yet one of the numerous assailants would only have to succeed once. Dealing with this constant threat seems like it would be frightening enough as a full-time job, but this would only be a hobby project for me.

How do the self-hosters on Lemmy avoid becoming one with the botnet?

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[–] Priyathium@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago

That's the point. It taught me things that I wouldn't learn if it weren't for that scared feeling. I agree that some sensitive things are better off my server.

You should start small and keep only things you want to be public, and services under basic logins. First logins, maybe admin admin but slowly you will get better and also place fail2ban and crowdsec. Once you have enough confidence and years of service on your belt. You can trust it with sensitive files under heavy guard.

[–] wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 week ago

Would something like Anubis or Iocaine prevent what you're worried about?

I haven't used either, but from what I understand they're both lightweight programs to prevent bot scraping. I think Anubis analyzes web traffic and blocks bots when detected, and Iocaine does something similar but also creates a maze of garbage data to redirect those bots into, in order to poison the AI itself and consume excessive resources on the end of the companies attempting to scrape the data.

Obviously what others have said about firewalls, VPNs, and antivirus still applies; maybe also a rootkit hunter and Linux Malware Detect? I'm still new to this though, so you probably know more about all that than I do. Sorry if I'm stating the obvious.

Not sure if this is overkill but maybe Network Security Toolkit might have some helpful tools as well?

[–] BigTurkeyLove@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Damn dawg, reading this made me not wanna self host my own instance. I was considering it.

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[–] dil@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 week ago

Tailscale on everything

[–] GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago
  • routine patching
  • siem log aggregation
  • proper alerting metrics and notifications
  • routine virus scanning
  • proper network segregation between your NATd network and your personal network
  • firewall firewall firewall
  • expose your applications to the internet through a WAF, never directly

if you can do all these things properly, then there shouldn't be too much danger in selfhosting your apps publicly.

[–] melroy@kbin.melroy.org 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] Atemu@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Wow is that ever a load of snake oil.

I see this kind of guide as actively harmful because it creates a false sense of security.

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