pitninja

If you want to learn a little bit more about Lemmy, this docs page on join-lemmy.org is a pretty good primer.

No worries! The Fediverse is a different world with unfamiliar terminology and we’ve all been there.

I think maybe you are confusing instances with communities? Instances are the servers you sign up your account on like lemmy.world or lemmy.ml whereas communities like asklemmy are hosted on an instance. I think there’s universal agreement that growing communities is generally a good thing because it leads to more content and discussion. Growing instances on the other hand isn’t super important (indeed there are going to be plenty of people like myself that are going to stick with a single user personal instance and be perfectly happy). I think the person you’re replying to was confused by the wording of your post.

Believe it or not, we’re living in the most peaceful period of human history thus far. I’d recommend the book The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker which talks about how far we’ve come. That said, I see the threat of global warming, lack of fresh water, famine, and energy scarcity becoming threats to the current status quo, though. If we don’t figure some things out as a species, we’re likely in for some turbulent times in the next hundred years.

You can run headless or do what the person I was responding to recommended and put it behind an authenticated portal, but that’s not really going to stop other instances and clients from accessing the same resources that op is hoping to limit access to except in the most basic case of people casually browsing op’s Lemmy instance through op’s own lemmy-ui.

Edit, but to be clear, what I was responding to and my response didn’t directly address op’s specific concern (which I kind of misunderstood myself before just now rereading) that outside/guest users shouldn’t be able to search for communities from other instances and I think it’s a fair concern because just searching for a community from another instance brings in posts and could be a vector for spam/abuse.

Wouldn’t this do basically nothing to prevent a 3rd party client from browsing your instance without authentication? I don’t know that there’s much that can really be done about this because you need open APIs for other instances to be able to access the content of your instance in order to make federation possible. That said, it’s an important consideration that anybody running a single person instance should consider. If you run a single person instance, people can learn a lot about you just by seeing which communities are available on your instance. The only way to obfuscate your actual interests is to have a dummy account subscribe to all the top communities on the biggest instances. (Which, honestly, this isn’t a bad strategy to employ anyway if you’re wanting a fresh All feed).