Help getting started
Help getting started
cross-posted from: https://compuverse.uk/post/5020
Preamble- I'm new to the fediverse, and I want some help. I'm trying to regain some of my privacy and data sovereignty, and I have recently gotten into self-hosting. I haven't been on social media for over a decade, except for Reddit, and that was mostly as a passive lurker. I just started getting more active on there this past year, and now they've turned me away with their shenanigans. I'm trying to get into federated communications to still have access to useful information while protecting my identity and data.
Goals- I'm thinking that I want to set up my own Lemmy instance, as well as my own xmpp server (like prosody), and switch over to jmp.chat. I also have my own domain.
Concerns- I want to spin up my own services so that I own my data and have greater control over my connections, and possibly have a hub that friends and family can use. However, I also don't want to expose my domain (Why not? I don't know. I'm completely new at this and until I learn more, I'm playing it cautious)
Questions- So, if I spin up my own Lemmy instance, doesn't that expose my domain,since my username will be [email protected]? Is this the same for an xmpp server? One main reason to spin up my own xmpp server is to own my account for xmpp communications. However, can I tie that to my jmp.chat account, or would they need to be separate.
I kind of feel like a boat without an oar at the moment, and I'm not even sure if I'm asking sensical questions, but hopefully there's enough light in my ramblings to give you all a sense of my goals. Any help would be appreciated.
The only way (to my knowledge) to "hide your domain", is to use bare IP addresses which got their own issues (most services like Matrix for example will not accept servers based on IP address but domain explicitly). If you want to use a pseudo-private environment for friends and family, I'd recommend picking a generic sounding domain name to hide any personal information possibly conveyed in the domain name and lock it off to only users you allow to sign up to your services etc.
As long as you federate (one of the keypoints of services on the Fediverse), your domain will be visible when posting towards an external party's instance. You would have to disable federation entirely to prevent that, which will keep posts locked away behind your instance and only the posts within that instance would be visible.