Hi everyone! I’m looking to run a Mastodon instance on a home server, entirely within LAN, without owning a domain. It does not need to interact with other Mastodon instances, but users on the local server should still be able to follow accounts on other Mastodon servers. Local users should also be able to create posts and see each other’s posts on the local instance. I’d appreciate advice from anyone running Mastodon this way at home. Thanks!
This is not possible. The other servers need to be able to communicate with yours, and for that, yours needs a domain name.
If you only care about local users following other local users, and only other local users, then this is possible. But if you add remote users into the mix, you need to federate, and to federate requires a domain name.