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?
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?
How does that make it easy for others to know the comunities you visit / subscribed to?
Only communities a user subscribes to get federated over.
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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.
…walla?
Voila
ooooh of course. I should’ve just tried saying it out loud haha
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)
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AFAIK post history is always public, like Reddit. I’m mainly concerned about subscription list
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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.
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?
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.
I’m afraid making your instance private disables federation.
As for making the web interface private, while it would prevent the average Joe from seeing federated communities, you could still do it through the API, which you have to keep public if you want to use alternative and mobile clients without a VPN.
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