Using pixelfed as a private instagram for friends and family

[luckym]

I would like to run a Pixelfed instance for friends and family only, however, I'm not familiar with federation and want to avoid confusing friends and family by them accidentally seeing users/posts from other instances and of course other instances seeing public posts on my instance.

ChatGPT mentioned the env variables ACTIVITY_PUB=false and FEDERATION=false. While the activity_pub variable exists in the config, it's not mentioned in the pixelfed configuration docs and the federation=fals variable sounds made up.

I found a setting on the admin page called ActivityPub with the not super helpful description of "ActivityPub federation, compatible with Pixelfed, Mastodon and other projects." which I turned off, but yeah there's still some lingering anxiety that my instance is communicating with others