Question with hosting a lemmy instance behind a VPN
Since ISPs in my country all use CGNAT i rely on tailscale for access outside I wanna try hosting my own lemmy instance and have a few questions
- Are you still able to federate with other instances?
- only people on the VPN will be able to join?
You'll be able to get an initial set of data from federation but you won't get any data beyond that.
Federation works via "pushes", but since your instance would be behind a VPN the other instances in the federation wouldn't be able to see it to push content updates.
Your best bet is probably Cloudflare tunnels, it's been suggested a few times in this community already.
Second best option is a cheap VPS, those can be obtained for $5/mo
Tailscale has funnels, you could check them to see if they can forward the traffic to your instance.
I don't know exactly how it'll work since the funnel has a specific URL provided by tailscale, so I don't know if a cname or something like that could work for a custom domain to your lemmy instance