The latter

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

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

My bad, corrected

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.

Is there any documentation you could link me to that would go into greater detail about how I can do that?

Alright, thank you for your help!

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.

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?