I’d like to host lemmy on my LAN and I’d be the only user, no registration open. I would subscribe to communities on other instances and my instance would get the posts and comments. would that work? I don’t need it to be accessible from the internet.
It is very possible to do this! What you need to do is to rent a low-end cloud VPS. Even a 5.00 digital ocean droplet running Ubuntu Linux would do the trick. Then you run an NGINX Proxy Manager reverse proxy with a WireGuard tunnel to the machine that will act as a server for your instance. From there you, you simply set up Let’s Encrypt certificates to use with your intended domain. Even though I am not behind CGNAT, I do this and it works very well.
EDIT: If you intend to do this entirely in open source and need some help, I’ll offer it. I am pretty passionate about open source and helping others out along the way.
It would need to be accessible from the outside and you can use Cloudflare Tunnel to make that connection.
Well, you can’t get updates from other instances without it being connected to the internet and reachable. So for your usecase you do need it connected to the internet. On the LAN you will only be able to see other instances on the same LAN.
Your service should be able to reach out of your lan to serve you content. I assume you’re running this as a local service on your PC or as a docker container.