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?
AFAIK post history is always public, like Reddit. I'm mainly concerned about subscription list
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.
... 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?
https://lemmy.saik0.com/communities?listingType=All
That's precisely the issue I'm talking about
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Oh that's interesting. I guess when your instance creates a local copy of the post, it would also add the corresponding community to the list to match.
..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)
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.
Why not just manipulate the API before it is delivered then?
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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.
That's exactly what I need. Could you share the script you use?
I finally found the script, sorry for the massive delay.
https://github.com/Fmstrat/lcs
It's named "Lemmy Community Seeder" which is probably why I couldn't find it anywhere, I wasn't searching for those terms.
I can't seem to find it in a Google search now so I'll take a look at my server in case I ran the script there and saved a copy. There appear to be a lot of similar tools now to assist with people moving over from Reddit but this script was really quick and handy.