So, I’ve started my own Lemmy instance. The main issue is that right now, I am the only user, which makes it pretty easy for anyone to see what kinds of communities I visited, or am subscribed to. Is there any way to automate creation of some amount of accounts, and subscribing to random communities?
If your concern is about your instance’s publicly visible /instances list, can’t you just make it private? Or even make the entire web interface private? You’re the boss, after all.
I’m afraid making your instance private disables federation.
As for making the web interface private, while it would prevent the average Joe from seeing federated communities, you could still do it through the API, which you have to keep public if you want to use alternative and mobile clients without a VPN.
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Why not just manipulate the API before it is delivered then?
You can probably make the list private by blocking the specific API endpoint or rewriting the JSON output in your reverse proxy. You could patch the Lemmy source code as well, of course.
External servers will still be able to see what remote sites you visit, but there’s no reason you couldn’t at least block the scrapers by messing with the JSON API. ActivityPub doesn’t mandate anything about these lists so federation should still work even if you disable 90% of the Lemmy API.