So, I’ve started my own Lemmy instance. The main issue is that right now, I am the only user, which makes it pretty easy for anyone to see what kinds of communities I visited, or am subscribed to. Is there any way to automate creation of some amount of accounts, and subscribing to random communities?
You could disable web interface access to block easy scraping. Unauthenticated users only need a few ActivityPub routes with very specific Content-Types to make federation work.
You can put the web UI and Lemmy API behind some kind of auth screen (you can use Caddy or Apache+OpenID to block access to URLs in your proxy unless the user is authenticated, of example) but that would break most apps. You could also whitelist your personal IP range or require a VPN for the frontend.
Your comment history will be visible to other servers so you’ll probably spread information that way. I can think of workarounds but they require patching the Lemmy source code. You could probably patch the Lemmy code to pick a random username for each comment to block other servers from tracking your comment history as easily (though server admins can still get all the comments for your domain, of course). Alternatively, you could make implement a 4chan-style “everyone is anonymous” system where all accounts turn into @[email protected] after posting by faking the data that gets rendered to the frontend. If you allow multiple people on your server, you’d all appear (and get banned/moderated) as one single user, but probably without breaking functionality (because the local database can still keep track of who actually owns what posts).
I think hiding the web UI and Lemmy API would probably block most scrapers. You can also mess with scrapers (feed the web UI fake data when an unauthenticated user queries it) if you really want. Your post history cached on other servers will be your biggest privacy challenge.
AFAIK post history is always public, like Reddit. I’m mainly concerned about subscription list
Running one of the various subscriber bots would make your own subscriptions simply be part of the noise otherwise on the server. The downside of course being that now you have a pile of noise to sift through. Left one sit for about a week onine and emded up with around 2000 communities subscribed.
How does that make it easy for others to know the comunities you visit / subscribed to?
clicks username
views comments you’ve posted
walla my egyptian friend
… okay? But if i subscribe to every lemmynsfw community, but never post to them… you’d have no idea.
With your own instance, looking at the instance list will show them all to anyone.
If you are the only user on an instance, your subscriptions are the only ones federating over into the server’s All feed. For example, even if you haven’t posted in all of these communities, is this not essentially your personal list of subscriptions?
That’s precisely the issue I’m talking about
…walla?
Voila
Only communities a user subscribes to get federated over.
Maybe by monitoring federation data, or seeing which communities have been fetched?
I know that if you’re the first person in an instance to look at a community, it won’t load right away. However I’m not sure how someone would monitor that (or why they would want to)
If there’s only one user that instance’s “all” feed will be indistinguishable from the user’s subscription feed.
(unless you do some community seeding)
If your concern is about your instance’s publicly visible /instances list, can’t you just make it private? Or even make the entire web interface private? You’re the boss, after all.
Why do you need to automate it and do multiple decoy accounts? Can’t you just make a single account and use it to subscribe to a bunch of the biggest communities?
