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.
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.
Thanks for that. I think I was getting confused between turning off all federation and defederating with an instance.
Setting all that aside, I would caution that even turning off federation isn’t enough to necessarily make it truly private. People could still discover it through random portscanning or whatever.
Yeah running solo you still need a hostname if anyone else is to reasonably use it, without resorting to vpns, private dns and/or other complexity.
And the default deployment of Lemmy is still publicly viewable without login so you’re still posting everything for the world to see. Security by obscurity is no security at all. As has been said a million times. Same naturally goes for privacy.