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
Depending on the legality and safety of doing so, you may also want to look into tech for avoiding censorship and oppresive regimes.
Things like TOR, running your own DNS server, etc.
Edit: I didn’t want to just leave this vague, so I looked up the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Surveillance Self-Defense guide hoping for some better specifics, but unfortunately it looks like it’s mainly about making security plans, understanding your risk profile, using secure settings on your personal devices, using signal, using TOR, and selecting “the VPN that’s right for you”.
Like you really have a choice of “the VPN right for you” when they shut down things to only approved in/out IPs.
There might be useful info there, but it wasn’t quite what I was hoping to point you at, sorry.
Considering the risks involved with hosting something like this, I would probably start with research on how you could host this safely/anonymously. That would be my first priority. Can’t help people if they take you out.
Next step would be looking at piefed/Lemmy or whatever systems you’re thinking about hosting and identifying what features/logs/etc you would need to disable, modify, or set up to clear themselves automatically so that you wouldn’t have information worth going after in the first place.
There is no way to bypass this. They don’t just filter/censor the Internet. They shut the whole outside of the country access down period. Not even the data centers are exempt. Starlink setup is the only way to bypass this system and it is very illegal and hard to find here
Something to consider about the fediverse is the federation aspect of it; consider re framing your starting position.
Basically, if you make the project “you” hosting “this one” fediverse instance, that instance can be taken down, hacked, its moderation team gets bored, etc…
However if you making the project about “creating access to self-hosting” fediverse instances, well now you have something more robust that at least in a hypothetical scenario, could survive the internet being cut off from the outside, because at least instances within the network can still federate.
Something that is self-hosted which could support with this is codeberg. You could set up some repo’s to sync with the main lemmy/ piefed/ whatever you want, then you get your community to create several federated instances as automatic backups to one another.
Regardless, your personal and operational security should be your highest priority. But if you make the priority getting the tools out, instead of hosting one particular instance, thats much harder to stop.
Thanks some great advice here you’re right it would be much better and more resilient. Gonna talk about this with others see what they can come-up with
Don’t want to go into specifics but I found a way to anonymously rent a VPS server here. This is also very illegal. The logs like you said are a big concern I need to figure that out for sure thanks good place to start