I wanted to do this long ago, but until 0.19.11, private mode also disabled federation. In 0.19.11, that was fixed, but when private mode was enabled, the server would not pull thumbnails for any links. Not ideal.

As of 0.19.12, that all seems to be resolved which means, I think, we can finally enable private instance mode.

Apologies if this has caused any issues as I was running tests earlier (the release version of Tesseract doesn't cleanly indicate private mode is enabled -- that's fixed in the dev version. Not sure if/how other apps/clients handle that).

What is Private Instance Mode?

When an instance is "private", you must be logged in to see any content (main feed, posts, communities, user profiles, etc). This prevents bots scraping content among other benefits. Content posted to local communities still federates out (unless the community is set to "local"), and everything else should work as before.

The main thing is that anyone viewing any content via this instance's API will require a logged-in account.

This does not cloak you. I want to be very clear about that. Anyone can view your profile from another instance and see your submissions. So don't be under the assumption that this is going to provide cover for things you'd normally not post. Also, this does not change the TOS / instance rules in any way. This is being enabled primarily as a way to keep scraper bots at bay by cutting off their access.

When is This Change Being Enabled?

As soon as I wrap up the 1.4.40 development branch of Tesseract and release/deploy it (which takes private instance mode into account). It's close, but due to an extended-family medical situation, I'm spending a lot of time at the hospital / with extended-family and have little time to work on Tess.

But I Don't Like That!

Then I want to hear from you. Please feel free to leave any concerns in the comments. There may still be bugs in the implementation I'm not aware of or use-cases I haven't thought of.