Private in this context means that it is isolated. If you want it to be private in the sense that it's only for you to use the you just close registrations.
Anonymity and federation are kind of oxymoronic.
this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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What is your definition of private?
You can disable registration (so you’re the only user and thus no one other than you can subscribe anything). You can simply not create communities on your instance (and thus no one can post anything). You can federate per normal and still browse anywhere you’d please.
Would that achieve what you’re looking for?
If you click on the link:
Use case: I run a single user instance where I don't create any of my own communities but I subscribe to and interact with a variety of communities on other instances. By making my instance non-private, everyone on the Internet can browse to it and see every remote community I've looked at which seems pretty bad for privacy.
The federation/API end point and the web-ui are entirely independent.
If you want, you can run the federated backend with no web ui at all and use it via mobile apps only.
Or you could put some password protection via the webserver in front of the web ui only.
I used a $2/mth vps and got an instance up in about 5 minutes with ansible. Took longer to pay for the instance and ssh into it than the Lemmy install
If I were worried about it gaining users then I'd just limit access to the UI or do some database maintenance
I run my own instance only me. Make sure you setup reverse proxy right :)