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
If it was me, I would not run Lemmy/Piefed in your situation. These things are designed to be fully open and visible to anyone who want to look at them. Probably not your use case.
I’d rather look at something like a Matrix instance, where you can have encryption and secrecy built in. Also, you say that you’re a noob in these things. If you want to hide from the government, you really do need someone very experienced to help you with security, or else it won’t end well.
All the best!
Well said I was thinking about matrix too seems to be a lot safer. But it’s not the platform I was looking for. I really need something like Lemmy where people can make communities share their interests not just group chats
Well then, your choices are: 1. Buy a server under a false name 2. Never connect directly to the server or the host’s site. Use proxies for management (preferably proxies in another country). 3. Change keys more often. 4. Reinstall the system on a VPS so that the disk is fully encrypted in case the VPS is seized or management is intercepted. LUKS is the best choice. 5. Don’t keep any logs on the server.
Even with all this, your VPS provider can still reveal the addresses of everyone who connected to the instance, so the most challenging part from a user experience perspective is: none of your users should connect directly to the instance, only through proxies or VPNs on other nodes.
Honestly, it’s much easier to publish an instance on Tor or I2P networks. But in any case, even if the server is published on I2P, follow all the points from the first paragraph.
UPD: honestly, it’s better to put a i2p Floodfill router on a VPS to support the anonymous network within the country. And promote node hosting. This will give much more benefit. Publishing something inside an anonymous network is much less risky than on the internet, though caution must still be exercised.
Thanks some great advice here I should add that hostings here are obligated to log anything they can by default. So that’s that I’m not gonna do or allow others to do anything too obviously illegal on my instance also it’s mostly for my friends and we gonna keep it somewhat private and closed. That stuff gonna take place somewhere else when the time comes
Good. It seems I unconsciously used my own experience. In my country, even having users limit on a platform requires you to register with the state service.
In that case, it doesn’t matter much what you set up. If you just need a chat, Matrix is a good option. Or maybe Mattermost if you need a nice client. There are also several social network platforms in the Fediverse.
Is there any where I can have a private community in the fediverse? Everything here is too open for us
The first step is to understand what you want exactly. Microblogging like Twitter? A social network like Facebook? A video hosting like YouTube? This depends on a lot. Lemmy communities can’t be closed out of the box, but YouTube for example can be closed to registered users or with a private link.
I should have mentioned. Micro blogging would be great for us.
You absolutely can run Fediverse software yourself. That’s how the internet was created and we have you claw it back from big Tech.
First you should figure out what you want to run. For a few folks and basic microblogging, GoToSocial is super easy to set up, but it’s limited.
Bonfire is an amazing fediverse app and it’s getting better everyday. They’re trying to make it a platform for communities and it’s very extensible.
Emissary is also amazing platform for fediverse stuff and then there’s HTML and CSS editor to really build what you want from there. Like bonfire, but you have to really create the site you want.
If you want reddit style, I like piefed over Lemmy.
Forums with fediverse? Nodebb.
Pictures only? Pixelfed
Live streams? Owncast
Hosting videos? Peertube
And it all interconnects. So you could run Bonfire, and follow someone on Peertube and comment and like from Bonfire.
It’s overwhelming. Id suggest write down what you’re wanting and then look at each project and see what fits.
I run my own bonfire at btfree.social and a public peertube at tubefree.org.
Happy to help however I can. I’ve done some install videos and going to do more soon.
I’d like to add to this, you might want to look into building your own guerilla infrastructure. Especially for said community. It will add some expense but also security and autonomy. Ali express is selling halow modules which can service kilometer links at a few megabytes under the right conditions. Not blazing, but usable and private. A mesh saturated with such modules could be fairly usable. Be careful on public networks.
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.
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.
And they can find everyone when they seize the server? Are the IPs logged too?
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.
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
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.
Hi i’m iranian, deploy matrix, that’s what most people did in the last blackout in the war, you can either keep federation on to help the load of others or turn off federation to get out the radar, theres no way to register a VPS inside the country under a false name so be very careful.
Never thought to find a fellow Iranian here Thanks you’re right matrix seems to be much safer. Just micro blogging aspect seems to be the issue
@aprehendedmerlin @artiman on mastodon i’ve read that @delta was getting popular iran and get hundreds of servers and thousands users. It’s easier to stay under the radar due to using email infrastructure.
I know there are quite a few comments already, so I hope you read mine. Bro, be fucking careful. Really understand what you’re implementing. Tbh in a small community, I would use snikket or something like that. But under authoritarian tyranny, you need to be sure you and your users cannot be tracked.
Ofcourse I’m going to carefully read and answer and appreciate every comment including yours so First thanks for your genuine concern. I’m well aware what they would do to me if I get noticed. We thought about this that’s why I’m gonna buy and setup and run anything needed on my own. Also I know my post sounds like we are some kind of freedom fighters group promise we are not plotting anything special there so no need to be worried about that also past experience shows that they don’t give a F about this stuff as long as it’s not big enough and kept somewhat private and closed and if they do they only target the ones running the platform which is going to be me alone no way I’m gonna put others in danger
