Anyone else like me—who is not a Facebook/Instagram user—learning for the first time that these things could not be said before?
Don’t get me wrong, I was taught better than that and anyone who says this stuff is a loser. Just never knew before this story that those posts/comments were blocked.
Dogs and cats, living together. Mass hysteria!
5). Hey OP, don't worry, this can seem kind of scary at first, but it is not that difficult. I've skimmed some of the other comments and there are plenty of good tips here.
2). Yes, you will want your own domain and there is no fear of other people "knowing it" if you have everything set up correctly.
1b). Any cheap VPS will do and you don't need to worry about it being virtualized rather than dedicated. What you really care about is bandwidth speed and limits because a reverse proxy is typically very light on resources. You would be surprised how little CPU/memory it needs.
1a). I use a cheap VPS from RackNerd. Once you have access to your VPS, just install your proxy directly into the OS or in Docker. Whichever is easier. The most important thing for choosing a reverse proxy is automatic TLS/Let's Encrypt. I saw a comment from you about certbot... don't bother with all that nonsense. Either Traefik, Caddy, or Nginx Proxy Manager (not vanilla Nginx) will do all this for you--I personally use Traefik unless for some reason I can't. Way less headaches. The second most important thing to decide is how your VPS in the cloud will connect back to your home securely... I personally use Tailscale for that and it works perfectly fine.
3). Honestly, I think Fail2Ban and geo restrictions are overdoing it. Fail2ban has never gotten me any lift because any sort of modern brute force attack will come from a botnet that has 1000s of unique IPs... never triggering Fail2ban because no repeat offenders. Just ensure your VPS has a firewall enabled and you know what ports you are exposing from Docker and you should be good. If your services don't natively support authentication, look into something like Authelia or Authentik. Rather than Fail2Ban and/or geo restrictions, I would be more inclined to suggest a WAF like Caddy WAF before I reached for geo restrictions. Again, assuming your concern is security, a WAF would do way more for you than IP restrictions which are easily circumvented.
4). Have fun!
EDIT: formatting
“Total Chaos” feels a bit overblown…
Thanks for your … er… um… reply? I guess? For what seems like a response to a different question than the one asked?
Nice try... North Korea. j/k. IDK man, because I watched "The Undeclared War". Give it a look.
Several other comments called me out for the same thing and you are right, I didn't mean to imply that there are not domestic bad actors also.
It was not my intention to suggest there are not "domestic bad actors". I live in America, and yes, that is a blanket term that we use to generalize countries that are antagonistic to "American values". We have plenty of domestic bad actors. I was painting with too broad of a brush and that was my bad.
State-sponsored
In another comment I was accused of being a brainwashed American, so take this for what it is, but some posts — mostly of a political nature — just seem to defy any mainstream thinking across the spectrum. Looking at some user profiles when I come across these, it seems their post history is entire based around fueling arguments, with no agenda, other than breed discontent.
Your point is fair and I didn’t mean to imply that bad actors are purely foreign. There are plenty of domestic bad actors. Please excuse the “propaganda framing”.
This was my subjective opinion based on the kinds of discussions and posts I see.
I'll be honest, this kinda feel like the wrong move. If correct information is the antiseptic to misinformation, wouldn't X be the exact place you should be posting your journalism to?