1 yr. ago • 97%

Is it possible to host a private, defederated, and completely isolated instance for use as your own social media platform?

I want to set up a collaborative writing/socializing platform for my friend group using something like Calckey/Misskey, and just want to know if this is possible.

The non Fediverse options all look very lacking, and are meant for corporate/business environments anyway. It really feels like there's not many good and modern options for this sort of thing, but maybe there's better alternatives. Who knows, I'm really new to this scene.

23 comments

Absolutely. Each server can be entirely standalone, you can just disable federation.

37
- Holy cow, that's sweet! I'll definitely give it a try then.
  
  12
- As I understand it, disabling federation stops you seeing other people’s content. It doesn’t stop others from seeing yours. Though how they would fibd yours is a different matter.
  
  3
  
  No not really. If you run federation and block an instance then all you do is not consume their pushes through ActivityPub. They can still consume your pushes. But if you turn of federation then you disable the whole of ActivityPub and you don't push anything. Remember that ActivityPub is primarily push based, i.e. your instance pushes new posts out to all federated instances instead of pulling new posts in.
  
  4
  
  This is a strange one. I assumed people wanting this type of service would want to view all the content from the fediverse but not push to the fediverse
  
  E.g. start your own instance of kbin and connect with everyone but turn off your own federation so no one sees your posts.
  
  Wonder if that scenario has been catered to?
  
  3
Truth social did it and so can you.

18
- I honestly forgot about this, there's also that Blue Sky thing I heard people talk about. I'm very excited to give this a go now.
  
  3
  
  Blue Sky uses a different protocol.
  
  8
You can run Lemmy private, without any federation.

If you are looking for something facebookish, than you could look at WordPress with BuddyPress plugins for example.

10
Just check the Private instance box in the settings and it'll do exactly that.

7
- This is really an option on Calckey??? I did not expect this use case to be accounted for, let alone supported.
  
  3
  
  Yes it’s possible on calckey.
  
  4
I think so, you'd just need to not add any other instances on your instance settings. Not 100% sure. I just started my own instance a couple of days ago. And I could not connect to other communities unless I whitelisted them in settings. Also there's a bunch of options and variables in configuration files that enable/disable activitypub.

5
I've been mucking about with the new claude.ai from anthropic, and thought I would ask it - here's what it said:

Y

Yes, it is possible to set up a private Lemmy instance for use within a group of friends. Here are some steps to do this:

Install Lemmy on a server you control. Lemmy is open source software written in Rust. You'll need a Linux server with Rust installed to run it.

Configure the Lemmy config file. Set the following options:

federated_timeline_enabled - false

registration_open - false

external_federation_enabled - false
This will disable public federated timelines and open registration.

Create user accounts manually. As an admin, you can create accounts for each of your friends on the Lemmy admin interface.

Consider enabling SSL. It's recommended to enable HTTPS encryption on your Lemmy instance. You can get a free SSL certificate from Let's Encrypt.

Share the URL only with friends. Don't publish the URL publicly, only share with your intended friend group.

Lock down the server access. Use firewall rules, VPN, or IP whitelisting to restrict access to the server.

Keep Lemmy updated. Watch for security updates and upgrade Lemmy regularly to stay safe.

Consider private federation. You could federate multiple private Lemmy instances to allow a broader reach while still keeping everything private.

That covers the basics! With those steps, you can have a private Lemmy server for your friend group to use.
5
Yes, but literally why tho.

4
- I stated why in the post.
  
  2
I believe I see options in my admin portal that would allow making your instance private. If that doesn't do what you want I wonder if you could populate the whitelist with a phony address which would affectively defederate you from everything.

2
I think I recall reading something about how it used to be something available from the UI settings, but I believe as it stands, there's no official setting in the admin panel to stop anyone else from being able to see your instance. You can disable open registration, and just not federate with anyone.

1

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