I find the idea of self-hosting to be really appealing, but at the same time I find it to be incredibly scary. This is not because I lack the technical expertise, but because I have gotten the impression that everyone on the Internet would immediately try to hack into it to make it join their bot net. As a result, I would have to be constantly vigilant against this, yet one of the numerous assailants would only have to succeed once. Dealing with this constant threat seems like it would be frightening enough as a full-time job, but this would only be a hobby project for me.
How do the self-hosters on Lemmy avoid becoming one with the botnet?
There’s a lot of technical answers here, but Tailscale is what you want OP. Self-hosting is only a risk if you open ports. Tailscale doesn’t require opening any ports.
Alternatively, you could set up your own VPN and forward one port to the VPN. The risk of port forwarding to VPN such as Wireguard or OpenVPN is minimal.
The risk of being attacked applies to those that port forward web traffic so it can be accessed without a VPN by themselves or others. If you don’t do that, the risk is very low.