So is there no way to run a Masto instance without port forwarding?

We are super disappointed :<

SO MUCH WORK AND HELP FROM OTHER PEOPLE

@spiderrobotpig what if
you started a tor mastodon instance
because you can start hidden services without portforwarding
and if you tell every server you're at one of those onion bridges from web to tor, you can get it working like that

(please note that if you do this, im pretty sure it will cause random sysadmins to have nightmares about this specific setup just because of it existing. this is eldritch networking abuse, basically)

@boots CAN YOU HELP US WORK THIS ELDRICH ABOMINATION OF AN INSTANCE BECAUSE WE DON'T UNDERSTAND WHAT THOSE WORDS MEAN BUT IT SOUNDS COOL

@spiderrobotpig basically what this implies is
oh god im going to have to draw a diagram and it's going to probably have to appreciably convey the pure horror of how this works

@spiderrobotpig okay first this is a good diagram of how hidden services work
basically you're just relaying through a node:
https://www.torproject.org/docs/hidden-services.html.en

@boots This is hella going over our head tho