Is it possible to change lemmy's domain?

pinkolik@random-hero.com to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 38 points –

Is it possible to change lemmy's domain after I have already started it once and produced some content? I am thinking of moving to a subdomain but I'm not sure if it will go smoothly

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You can, but other servers will not recognize it as the same server.

There are however ways to run your server on a subdomain and make it appear as if it's still the original domain. Is that what you're looking for?

That might fit my needs. Could you explain in more details please?

/well-known/webfinger. If you use a reverse proxy on your main domain (example.com), you have it forward traffic from example.com/well-known/webfinger to subdomain.example.com/well-known/webfinger

Is renaming the instance domain without reinstalling Lemmy related to changing the WebFinger query? It's the trick some instances use to have a different instance domain from their username domain, like @user@domain.com while the instance is mastodon.domain.com.

Yes, that was what I was referring to. However, this is assuming that Lemmy has properly implemented webfinger and doesn't store direct links (which I haven't checked).

Alternatively, you could proxy all requests with application/activity+json in the Accept or Content-type headers.

run your server on a subdomain and make it appear as if it's still the original domain.

Do you mean make it look like the top level domain? Cause if so, do you have a link I can read a little about? I'm thinking of deploying my own lemmy instance.

It's possible by having the webfinger endpoints at the "root" while keeping the rest of Lemmy on a subdomain. The main thing that determines the domain in your username is webfinger.

No clue if Lemmy or kbin support this config though, but quite a bit of the microblog-only parts of fedi do, and it's a widely used thing.