Yup, there are a lot of old forum posts that basically boil down to:

Lost user (0 comments/1 posts): Hey, I’m having a weird error and haven’t been able to find anything about it. Sorry if this is a newbie question, but I’ve already tried searching for it and have come up empty-handed:
{Detailed error description}
{Detailed instructions to recreate error}
{Debug level logs showing the error}

Forum mod (1,234,567 comments/65,535 posts): {Insert any/all of the following: RTFM/This could be fixed with a simple command (without posting what the command is)/It works on my machine/Just run sudo rm -rf --no-preserve-root / and go back to Windows, Skill issue, Duplicate post (without linking to the post that has an answer), etc…} Closing this post.

And Docker. There are a number of ways of packaging complete self-contained images with all of their dependencies included. In the olden days, managing dependencies on a stack of services was basically a full time job, especially when you had multiple services that all needed different versions of the same dependency.

Of course, the downside is that it potentially leads to bloat when you have multiple containers running. If you have three different images that are packaged with the same dependency version, you’re effectively running that dependency three times. Compared to simply running it once, and having all three services access it.

It’s really just a trade-off between convenience and efficiency, and most modern hardware is probably capable of handling a little bit of container bloat. Containers effectively take the modern AAA game dev approach of “we don’t need to make it ultra efficient or worry too much about compressing file sizes, because modern hardware will be able to handle it even if it’s inefficient. If users can’t boot it, we can just tell them to use better hardware.”

I actually just updated it slightly, and may continue to do so if I think of things. So you may simply want to check back here instead of printing it.

On Cloudflare, you’ll want to set a DNS record to point any relevant subdomains to your current WAN IP address. IPv4 will be an A Name record. IPv6 would be an AAAA Name record, but I’m not going to deal with IPv6 for this… Here is an example of mine, with info blocked out:

So for instance, maybe you have a peepee.example.com subdomain, a poopoo.example.com subdomain, etc which all point to your WAN IP address. That will basically tell Cloudflare’s DNS to forward any traffic for those subdomains to your WAN IP. Each subdomain can also choose whether or not to proxy the content, or just directly send it to your WAN with DNS. Basically, when Cloudflare propagates the DNS records to the various DNS servers, you can choose whether that record has your WAN IP (DNS Only) or one of Cloudflare’s (Proxied). Proxy support means you can take advantage of some additional CF protections, but it also means passing all of the data through CF’s server. In most cases, you’ll want DNS Only. Proxy support will depend on the individual service. Some will work fine with it, some won’t. And it’s also possible that you don’t want services proxied through CF for privacy reasons.

Next, you’ll want to set up a reverse proxy service. This will be something like Nginx Proxy Manager, Caddy, etc that you run on a device on your LAN. It can even be on the same machine running your various services. The big reverse proxies all offer Docker images, so you can incorporate it directly into an existing Docker stack if you already have one. Personally I use NPM, but Caddy is also very popular.

You’ll tell this reverse proxy “when you receive valid traffic addressed to {subdomain}, forward it to {relevant service on your LAN}.” You can also set some additional options for each subdomain, like automatically upgrading to https. For instance, maybe peepee.example.com forwards to 192.168.1.100:42069 on your LAN, and is configured to automatically upgrade any http traffic to https, and to require https.

You can also set up automatic TLS certificate renewal, so https traffic can be properly encrypted. The reverse proxy will need an API key, and it will allow the service to automatically check expiration dates and pull a fresh TLS cert for your domain if the date is coming up soon.

You’ll probably want to use a wildcard certificate, (basically *.example.com) because the TLS certificates are open to the public. So if you do individual certs for all of your various services, bots will scrape the public records and you’ll inevitably get a lot of bot traffic probing your various subdomains. A wildcard domain usually means the bots hit the standard example.com and www.example.com first, which makes them super easy to detect and block. I even have rules set up to automatically block anything that tries to access my www subdomain, because I specifically don’t host a landing page and don’t have anything available there. So I know that any traffic hitting that www subdomain is a bot trying to access common subdomains.

Next, you’ll want to forward ports 80 and 443 to your reverse proxy. Port 80 is the standard port for http traffic, and 443 is the standard port for https traffic. These will be the ports that your reverse proxy actually receives the traffic on, before forwarding it to the various services. Note that lots of lazy devs default to using 80 and 443 for lots of things, so you may want to configure your router to use a different port (like 81 or 444) for its config page if you’re able. Otherwise, you may end up accidentally locking yourself out of your router’s config page, because it will attempt to use 80 to reach the page, then get automatically forwarded to the reverse proxy instead.

Finally, for some ease-of-maintenance, you may want to consider adding a DDNS service (like Cloudflare-DDNS) to your docker stack. This will occasionally check your current WAN IP, and update it with Cloudflare if necessary. For example, if you have an outage and your router gets a new WAN IP when it boots back up again. Normally you would need to manually go to Cloudflare and update the IP info to point at your new address. But DDNS does that automatically.

The way traffic flows when it is all set up is along these lines:

1. A device wants to access your service at peepee.example.com. It doesn’t know where to find that site, so it asks a DNS server.
2. Cloudflare has told all of the various DNS servers “hey, peepee.example.com can be found at {your IPv4 WAN address}”.
3. The device follows that DNS record, and attempts to connect to your IPv4 WAN address, on port 80 or 443. For this example, let’s say it tries to connect on port 80 for standard http traffic. The device knocks on port 80’s door and says “hey, I’m here to access http://peepee.example.com/.”
4. Your reverse proxy checks the configured list, finds the valid peepee.example.com subdomain, finds it has a valid TLS cert, finds it is configured to automatically upgrade to https, and responds “Yes, please upgrade to https. Http traffic is not allowed.”
5. The external device knocks again, this time on port 443’s door. It goes “hey, I’m here to access https://peepee.example.com/. Your reverse proxy goes “thank you, here is the TLS cert and my half of the TLS security handshake.”
6. Your external device uses the data in the TLS cert to validate and complete the TLS handshake with the reverse proxy, and the traffic between the reverse proxy and your external device is now encrypted with https. Your device gets the nice little “secured” padlock icon in your browser. Because the traffic is encrypted, a malicious actor may be able to tell what kind of info you are passing (for example, a video stream will likely have a pretty obvious pattern) but they won’t be able to see what specific data you are passing. They may be able to tell that you’re streaming a video, but they won’t know which video specifically.
7. The reverse proxy forwards the traffic to the service, configured at 192.168.1.100:42069.
8. Your service does not ever know the device is being accessed via WAN, because (as far as the service can tell) the traffic is coming from your reverse proxy (also a LAN device). So any “pay to use WAN” services will continue to work for free.
9. The external device never gets access to info like the specific LAN IP or port number, because it only has access to the reverse proxy. All of the traffic is passing back and forth between the reverse proxy.

But notably, keep in mind that the reverse proxy didn’t do any actual user authentication. If your service has a weak password, a reverse proxy will act as a gateway for any potential hackers to gain access to the service. The same way an open port is a gateway directly to the service, the reverse proxy is now a gateway that simply requires an attacker to use a subdomain instead of an IP and port number. And if you make your subdomain something like jellyfin.example.com it will probably be dead simple for a bot to guess. And any vulnerabilities in the service will still be exploitable via the reverse proxy, because the reverse proxy is simply making sure the request is valid, and then passing the traffic back and forth. It isn’t actually inspecting the content of that traffic, so it’s not going to stop things like attackers. When you hear digital security folks talk about things like attack vectors, this is what they’re referring to. Your reverse proxy is a potential vector of attack for your configured services. Use strong passwords, keep your services updated, etc…

You can technically add authentication to a reverse proxy. So for instance, maybe a service doesn’t have any built-in way to add a password. You can have the reverse proxy act as an authentication gate, so it will prompt the user for a username+password before they can even reach the service. This will make the services more secure (yes, even the ones that already have passwords, as long as you use a different password for your reverse proxy authentication) but it will break most apps that are designed to work with a service. For instance, Jellyfin has several apps that work, but those apps won’t have any way to get past the reverse proxy’s password gate. So those apps will simply break if you add a second layer of authentication with your reverse proxy.

There are also some security options you’ll likely want to enable on Cloudflare’s side, but this comment is already long enough.

I think this is a very well thought out approach to handling it. I can’t personally think of any better solutions, at least. I probably would have chosen some different phrasing for the tags, (CBH feels… Disconnected? I’d probably go with something like “No AI” or “AI-Free” instead), but that’s just a matter of personal diction. Outright banning posts about projects that use AI likely isn’t going to be feasible in the long run, and I think that simple declaration requirements will go a long way towards encouraging people to actually disclose their usage.

If you outright ban it, people will simply hide their usage. It feels like it’s akin to the US War On Drugs^TM in that way. If you allow it and simply require responsible disclosure, more people will be inclined to be upfront about it. And that allows projects to be more accurately audited and vetted. The same way the war on drugs consolidated power to organized gangs (by making them the only ones capable of producing and transporting illegal drugs at scale), an outright ban on AI would only encourage people to hide their usage.

One potential way I see people trying to skirt the rules regarding self-promos is via proxy/strawman accounts. It would be trivial for me to spin up a dummy account and post my own project as an “I found this cool project but don’t have to disclose my AI use because I didn’t make it” post. I don’t personally have any projects in the works to post about, but I can easily see someone using it to try and skirt the disclosure requirements. Especially when we have seen situations like the (now infamous) Huntarr debacle, where the vibe-coder dev was actively avoiding AI disclosures. Because they knew it would tank the project’s popularity if people knew it was vibe coded.

I’m not sure if there is a good solution for this potential issue, except maybe to limit posts by new users. But even that is trivial to bypass. If you limit them based on account age, simply making a few strawman accounts and waiting for them to age is easy. Hell, I already have a few old throwaway accounts that I could swap over to whenever I want, and I’m not even planning anything nefarious.

There are similar problems with restricting users based on post/comment count, as that will likely stifle discussion from new users who are trying to be active in the community. One of the more frustrating parts about Reddit was that many of the most popular subs banned posts from users who were below a certain post karma threshold or who didn’t have enough previous posts. It created a catch-22 where you needed to have a few popular posts before you were allowed to make any posts. So there were people posting on random niche subs, simply for karma farming before they could then post on the larger subs. And if I was a vibe coder without scruples who is already looking to skirt the rules, it would be trivial for me to spin up an LLM and let it make a few comments before I start using it as a dummy account.

This may end up being a non-issue in the grand scheme of things. But I figured I’d mention it, because I genuinely don’t see a good solution for patching the big glaring hole in the self-promo rule. You’re absolutely correct that requiring disclosure for every post is unrealistic, because lots of users who post projects here aren’t the devs. They just stumbled across a cool project and wanted to share it, and they have no realistic way of knowing if the project uses AI. And if you restrict promo posts to only devs, you’ll only get posts from the people who fall into the (likely very small) overlapping section on the “is a Lemmy user” and “makes projects” Venn diagram. Lemmy is already a small community in the grand scheme of things. And restricting promo posts to only the people actively developing the projects would make it feel even smaller.

If I do use mine, I’ll put it up on codeberg so everyone can see exactly what its doing… and then get mad and tell me there is a better way.

Poe’s Law is always in effect. The best way to get an answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it is to post an incorrect answer, because people will go out of their way to correct you.

You have trouble getting Docker to auto-start on Windows? I thought that was the default behavior… Hell, even if it’s not, you can just add a Docker shortcut to the Startup folder.

Why do you type in all caps? It looks like you’re yelling…

My guess was that it’s users who fundamentally misunderstand federation, and think that deleting their comments will prevent them from being scraped or used to ID them later. In reality, if someone was truly concerned about avoiding doxxing, they’d just switch accounts. Because anyone can spin up a single-user instance, federate to scrape content from all the communities they want, and then simply refuse to respect delete requests.

Because when you delete something on a Lemmy instance, the instance simply sends a delete request to all the other instances that federated with it. But those other instances can easily ignore the delete request and retain the deleted content for as long as they want.

That’s also part of why it’s so stupid that AI crawlers are scraping Lemmy and thrashing instance owners’ rate limits. The AI crawler could just set up a new instance and automatically gather the content via federation. But instead, they just send crawler bots. Because fuck the instance owners, I got my content either way and using a crawler bot didn’t require me to learn how federation works.

Yeah, the Tizen app will be huge for me. I’ve been dual-running Plex and JF specifically because a few of my users have Tizen devices. And there’s no way I’d be able to explain sideloading to my “throws up their hands and says it’s too complicated as soon as they see anything unexpected” relatives over the phone.

Luckily, I got a lifetime PlexPass like a decade ago, before JF even existed. So it’s not like supporting Tizen is costing me anything extra.

Also probably worth noting that this is the exact type of person who should never be allowed to use Sherlock.

Real talk though, Tor for porn would be an awful experience and would slow down the entire Tor network. Tor is slow to begin with, and downloading large files (like videos) only slows things down even more for everyone. It should be a last resort, not the first thing people flock to. It’s the same reason people avoid torrenting over Tor; It’s slow and inefficient, so your downloads take fucking forever.