Scrapers are getting so bad that the lemmy containers are falling over, so I’ve disabled anonymous access to allow legit users to continue using the service. I will work on improving filtering so I can reenable anonymous access. Apologies for the inconvenience.

Interesting. I’ve seen that option but this GitHub post made me think it would do more than what I wanted. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3148
I think the original implementation of that setting disabled public access AND disabled federation, however it appears the ability to disable federation was subsequently split into a different setting. (I have private mode turned on and we are still communicating across instances, so I know federation is still working). I am not sure that is what you were referring to, though…