this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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Self-hosted lemmy without serving arbitrary federated content? (reddthat.com)
submitted 2 years ago by EthernalExplorer@reddthat.com to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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I want to self-host lemmy and participate in federation. However, I wonder whether it's possible to have a setup where only I, and trusted users, are allowed to browse federated-content.

Basically, guests should not be allowed to use my instance to browse other federated content. So requests to "mydomain.tld/c/whatever@otherdomain.tld" should not be possible. Only users, logged-in on my instance, should be able to do that.

Despite that, guests should be allowed to see posts of communities posted on my instance, and users of other instances should be allowed to comment.

I know I can choose with which other instances mine should link with, but this would make the experience inconvenient to me. Because then I would need to adjust the config if I want to subscribe to a community on an instance I have not yet linked with.

Is such setup possible? Could not find the answer in the docs unfortunately

The only thing I can think of is something like blocking UI requests, and allow them only from localhost (so I would create a "ssh -L" tunnel on the server). Federation API endpoints would not be blocked. But this seems shaky, does Lemmy support a cleaner, built-in solution?

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[–] qazwsxedcrfv000@lemmy.unknownsys.com 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (8 children)

The simplest way is to add a Basic auth to the lemmy-ui, say via the reverse proxy.

[–] stu@lemmy.pit.ninja 4 points 2 years ago (3 children)

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).

[–] qazwsxedcrfv000@lemmy.unknownsys.com 4 points 2 years ago

Yes the basic auth way I suggested only protects the lemmy-ui from being accessed which is the lowest hanging fruit in the equation. That's also why I call it the "simplest way". "Interested parties" can still access your instance via API if they know their way.

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