I’m reading up on self-hosting Lemmy, and I was planning on creating my own private instance for individual use on some spare Azure ASP I use to host private FreshRSS (not rich to host a public service).
This basically shuts my idea down, because I wanted to simply host my account myself and browse all of Lemmy as I please.
So is everyone hosting individual instances dealing with them being public? is there a workaround to avoid having a public service that anyone can see?
The federation/API end point and the web-ui are entirely independent.
If you want, you can run the federated backend with no web ui at all and use it via mobile apps only.
Or you could put some password protection via the webserver in front of the web ui only.