Hosting does not attract CSAM on its own. Anonymous uploads do. Only host services that you find useful yourself, and maybe sharing it with friends, and that's a reasonably safe start.
this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2026
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Tusen takk, kompis! I wanna run a Lemmy server, do you think I can still do it with just a bare computer and no VPS?
You can. But it will be easier if you have a static IP.
Haha I love how this has progressed, from 'What free VPS?' then 'Free VPS doesn't work' and now we're at 'What can I do without a VPS?'.
Anyway, I was self hosting from home well before I started playing with VPSs, so it's a good way to get started before having to spend money. And I still self host most of my infrastructure just because I prefer upfront costs to subscriptions.
Edit: I meant to add if you don't have a publicly routable IP or don't want to port forward, you can use something like Cloudflare Tunnels to proxy everything through their servers.
What is going on with you? Anyway, if you want to try self-hosting on a VPS, make an account on lowendspirit.com and hang out there for a while. There are lots of offers for free or ridiculously cheap VPS there. Like this starts at 25 cents per month ($3 per year):
Open a thread there saying what you're trying to do, and ask for hosting and for technical help if you need that.
It's not that inneficient, but you still need a way to get a public IP. I know they are free services for it. Look at tailscale maybe?
Thanks! That's what I'm using!
- Why do you want your own Lemmy instance? Can't you just create a community on another instance?
- May not be the answer you want, consider exposing your laptop's service(s) via Cloudflare Tunnels. That's the best way if you don't have an exposable public IP.
- Lemmy and other services will make outbound requests and leak your residential IP. If this is a problem for you, you should proxy outbound traffic on the machine
- Have you considered Oracle but in another region? Or do they geo-restrict you?
- For questionable content, look onto moderation tooling for Lemmy. Keep watch on your media folder(s) regularly and delete offensive ones
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| CSAM | Child Sexual Abuse Material |
| IP | Internet Protocol |
| VPS | Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) |
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 6 acronyms.
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