Yeah, if you’re running something yourself, you can do pretty much whatever you want in order to protect it. Especially if it’s behind a reverse proxy. Firewalls are great for protecting ports, but reverse proxies can be their own form of protection, and I don’t think a lot of people associate them with “protection” so much. Why expose paths (unauthenticated) that don’t need to be? For instance, in my case with my Lemmy instance, all any other instance needs is access to the /api path which I leave open. And all the other paths are behind basic authentication which I can access, so I can still use the Lemmy web interface on my own instance if I want to. But if I don’t want others browsing to my instance to see what communities have been added, or I don’t want to give someone an easy glance into what comments or posts my profile has made across all instances (for a little more privacy), then I can simply hide that behind the curtain without losing any functionality.

It’s easy to think of these things when you have relevant experience with web development, debugging web applications, full stack development, and subject matter knowledge in related areas, if you have a tendency to approach things with a security-oriented mindset. I’m not trying to sound arrogant, but honestly my professional experience has a lot to do with how my personal habits have formed around my hobbies. So I have a tendency to take things as far as I can with everything that I know, and stuff like this is the result lol. Might be totally unnecessary without much actual value, but it errs on the side of “a little more secure”, and why not, if it’s fun?