Creating decoy Lemmy accounts for plausible deniability
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?
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)
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.
People were talking about a script that would go out and subscribe to a bunch of communities. As long as that's better enough should be able to operate under that umbrella?
I did this on my instance. You create a new user and give the script those credentials, it goes out and subs to all the trending communities across the various instances so now my instance has a big mish-mash of communities federated, not just the ones I originally subscribed to on my personal user.