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
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.