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
I’m not sure of the details about the situation in Iran, but from my understanding, it seems that it would be much safer to set up a server outside the country that’s run by you and others inside the country. It’s fairly easy to set up virtual private servers, although you may need to arrange payment outside the country.
That would be much safer than hosting it with the physical infrastructure inside your borders. If you’re hosting the physical infrastructure, it makes it much easier to locate. If the server is not in Iran, then it may be difficult or impossible for the government to seize it and access the contents.
There are people on this site who are far more expert than I when it comes to network security. Follow their feedback and you may even find someone willing to partner with you to help set it up.
You’re right hosting outside is safer for sure but that misses the whole point of keeping people in touch when they cut off the global part of the world wide web making it a local to the country intranet network. I’m gonna start this on my own there are a lot of documentation for me to read through and figure out when I’m ready I’m gonna ask if anyone is willing to help I would be happy to accept