Yeah, you're definitely right about that. I would still like to prevent that from happening. I'd rather it shows the general area of a place nowhere near where I'm at.

Thanks a bunch for this! This actually does well enough to answer all of my questions in a way that will allow me to get started! Very much appreciated.

We like the reddit-adjacent function in lemmy compared to a standard bbs.

My bad, corrected

Thanks a lot for your thoughtful reply! I greatly appreciate it

Sorry I thought I had that included. We're primarily in the US. Very rarely we see users from the UK though.

The latter

Alternatively you can run your own VPN with a VPS (and use it like a reverse proxy), then you can easily control the port forwarding.

This latter part, please forgive me as this is the first time I'm looking into hosting a web service. My plan was to purchase a domain with Google, which would include WHOIS privacy. Is this what you're referring to here?

If I’m not mistaken to make your instance available to other people you’d have to set up a reverse proxy. And a correctly set up reverse proxy shouldn’t reveal your IP, only the local IP (127.0.0.1).

Thank you for this information, if this is correct it sounds like this isn't something I need to worry about then.

Alright, thank you for your help!