Tired of your instance getting pounded by bots and scrapers? Solved.
Instances that are not trying to attract a new audience might want to turn on the new Private Instance setting, which makes everything private. The home page, posts, communities, etc will all require a login to view. Bots and scrapers won't be able to get anything useful from your instance and will stop trying.
Also if a single-user instance is subscribed to mostly NSFW communities, maybe they don't want everyone to be able to see which communities are listed at /communities.
Or it could be used temporarily when a biiig flood of scrapers turn up, then turn it back off when they go away.
Edit: Federation is unaffected by this. For logged-in users everything continues as before.
Scrapers have been a problem for a lot longer than LLMs have been an issue. Fighting them has always been a pain in the proverbials, but theres been some entertaining work recently on deliberately getting them lost in a maze of made up pages. The problem is that they never stop or go away. They'll just keep trying, and new ones keep springing up.
I had coded up something similar (but less configurable) on my own single-user pyfedi instance. But this is really nice. In particular it's surprising that we can now do something that lemmy can't (yet).
Or in other words, I keep seeing you come out with fantastic features, and can hardly contain myself from biting the bullet and going all in, excellent work. :)