this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2025
-15 points (34.0% liked)

Selfhosted

50448 readers
359 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

As a follow up to this post in this community: The Future is NOT Self-Hosted

I have thought about how to set up local, community-hosted fediverse servers that respect privacy and anonymity while still guaranteeing that users joining the server are human-beings.

The reasoning behind these requests is that:

  • You want anonymity to guarantee that people won't face repercussions in real life for the opinions they voice in the internet. (liberty of free speech)
  • You want to keep the fediverse human, i.e. make sure that bot accounts are in the minority.

This might sound like an impossible and self-contradictory set of constraints, but it is indeed possible. Here's how:

Make the local library set up a fediverse server. Once a month, there's a "crypto party" where participants throw a piece of paper with their fediverse account name into a box. The box is then closed and shaked to mix all the tokens in it. Then, each one is picked out and the library confirms that this account name is indeed connected to a human. Since humans have to be physically present to throw in a paper, it is guaranteed that no bot army just opens a hundred anonymous accounts. Also, the papers are not associated to a particular person that way.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] rtxn@lemmy.world 10 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I don't think you fully comprehend just how many footprints people leave behind on the internet. Users would have to practice perfect opsec -- and I mean completely, absolutely perfect. One mistake, like using an e-mail address or an alias off-site, will link a person to the account. If that person cracks under legal threats, the entire operation is fucked. It's happened before.

Thinking you can solve the issue of privacy with a single idea is simply delusional.