Lemmy 0.19.11 (which I’ve just upgraded AZ to) has a new feature to allow regular federation, but require users be logged in to view content.

I’d like to gauge feedback from users on this. It will not add privacy, or limit the propagation of posts/comments etc. But it will limit AZ server resource consumption by bots or users that are not logged in.

Thoughts/concerns on enabling this feature?

Update: thank you all for your thoughts and feedback on this. We’ll leave AZ as it is, though may use this feature in future if we need to mitigate attacks or other malicious traffic.

  • zero_gravitas@aussie.zoneEnglish
    0·
    14 days ago

    As others have mentioned, there’d seem to be hard downsides:

    • Can’t send direct links to people who don’t have an account
    • Harder for people to ‘discover’ the instance or check it out, which would surely reduce people signing up to the instance and participating in our community into the future

    So I’d be against it unless there’s really strong reasons for it. I haven’t really experienced bad server-load issues.

    There’s conceivably a middle-ground where the instance becomes logged-in-only automatically under high load. That’d no doubt be a considerable extra work, but just throwing it out there as an idea. I still don’t think even that’s necessarily a great idea, because again, if the traffic is people showing interest in the instance, that’s a good thing in the long term. It’d be better than setting it to logged-in-only all the time, though.

    I think logged-in-only should be pretty much a last resort for addressing performance issues, and all other possibilities should be considered first, including spending more money.