That'd be really nice as a feature.
My main concern on my end is someone using my instance to go browse some illegal content off another instance, and now I'm legally on the hook for it because now my instance is publicly serving that content.
this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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Exactly this is what I am worried about, you can get into trouble quickly. Good luck explaining to lawyers/judges that it's not your content actually but just federation. Even if you could, in most jurisdictions you wouldn't be off-the-hook anyway.
I said it in a higher comment with other info but try looking up a remote community that isn't already known by an instance, without being logged in. It won't look it up for you and just silently fail. If unwanted content is what you're worried about unfortunately a malicious actor can basically just drop content directly into your instance without prior notice if your federation is open. This is why db0 is working on systems that will in the future work like shared blacklists (opt-in of course).
Seriously if you really want to host your own instance, it is more or less your responsibility as an admin to moderate that instance. That includes purging and blocking unwanted contents. There is no way to avoid that.
As for your suggestion, it largely boils down to restricting anonymous access to the search related APIs in an instance. It is no doubt a good feature, espeically for read-only instances. I think you can create an issue about it in Github to get more visibility from the devs.
The simplest way is to add a Basic auth to the lemmy-ui, say via the reverse proxy.
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).
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.
open APIs for other instances to be able to access the content of your instance in order to make federation possible.
the federation API is independent of the front-end client API. You can run headless, without lemmy-ui, and federation still works. The API structure for federation is standardized, the front-end client API is unique to Lemmy.
You can run headless or do what the person I was responding to recommended and put it behind an authenticated portal, but that's not really going to stop other instances and clients from accessing the same resources that op is hoping to limit access to except in the most basic case of people casually browsing op's Lemmy instance through op's own lemmy-ui.
Edit, but to be clear, what I was responding to and my response didn't directly address op's specific concern (which I kind of misunderstood myself before just now rereading) that outside/guest users shouldn't be able to search for communities from other instances and I think it's a fair concern because just searching for a community from another instance brings in posts and could be a vector for spam/abuse.
Not OP, but I do feel dumb for not thinking of that assuming it would defederate me. Oh well, got a cool domain out of it
It might. Some mods/instance admins might see your comments, decided to check your instance, and found it suspicious because it's protected behind basic auth and decided to block your instance. You can see in the modlog that people sometimes bans private instance (instance that don't let you see anything unless you're logged in) out of suspicion that they are a source of bots traffics.
A better way is probably to only protect your search page behind basic auth so no one can hook in new communities in your instance.
It would not affect federation as the endpoints are still open. But a word of caution. This only protects the lemmy-ui from being accessed without the basic auth credentials. If someone tries to access your instance via API, it will still work.
You could also route any calls to /api through authentication. However I am not sure if that can cause any problems. Is there a list of endpoints that need to be reachable for federation to work?
Anonymous users can't actually lookup other instance communities through yours in the same way logged in users can. They'll only be able to see a remote community if a user who's already been logged in on your instance has searched it up before and/or is subscribed, but they can't just arbitrarily make your instance look up other instance communities.
Then I guess you could configure nginx to not allow /c/ requests that have an @ unless the "jwt" cookie is present and do the same with your search endpoints. Of course, someone could just add an arbitrary jwt cookie to try and bypass it but if the point is more to make the average anon user not waste your server resources I think that should do. Without search and without the communities visible via /c/ everything within it wouldn't be indexed in search results so the only way for them to see a federated post through your instance would be a direct link to one.
Lemmy has a feature/setting called "Private instance" that I think could be used to achieve this, but I think that got broken at some point because it got tied to turning federation off... not sure what the current state is but may be worth looking into.
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