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

[joseph]

@luckym AFAIK, there is nothing in ActivityPub which makes it reach out to others on it's own. Unless you talk to others, it won't talk to anyone. Maybe you can disable all these 4 vars - https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed/blob/dev/.env.example#L52

[luckym]

@joseph Thanks for the pointer, yeah I think it's just not meant for that use case but with the adjustment of some settings it's possible. For example profiles are public by default, meaning if I post, my post will show up on my public profile that anyone with access to my page/username can view.