this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2024
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I don’t know why people keep attributing privacy to Lemmy when ActivityPub is anything but.
Is ActivityPub logging which IP I post from? Is ActivityPub monitoring which communities I view? Is ActivityPub blocking me from browsing with my VPN on?
That depends on the implementation.
That depends on the implementation.
That—believe it or not—depends on the implementation.
We already have an implementation. You me and OP are all on Lemmy. So can you answer these in the context of Lemmy again?
I actually can’t answer them, because I only admin this instance, I don’t run it.
While I’m sure this is not the case, it’s entirely possible that the people who do run this instance are running a fork of it that does all of those things. It couldn’t log your IP address or block your VPN, but it could mine, and your instance could yours. And I haven’t read the Lemmy source code, so I don’t know what even an unmodified Lemmy logs.
(Actually this instance is running a fork right now, or rather a branch: 0.19.6-beta1, because lemmy.ml is the core Lemmy developers’ instance for testing beta code before releasing production versions.)
But you can read the source code and get an understanding of whether it is collecting private information or not. You can theoretically also fork the code and make your own version of Lemmy where you're ripped out the parts that collect private information. Can you do any of those things with Reddit? Absolutely not. You have no idea what exactly Reddit collects and even if you did you have no control over that collection.
What you're doing is questioning the privacy aspect without putting in the effort to check if your questioning is valid. Nobody is preventing you from reading the source code. And if you don't trust anyone else running the instance you can fork Lemmy, make whatever privacy changes you need and host your own instance. That goes beyond the capabilities of the average user but that's the catch with privacy, if you can't trust others then you have to learn more to get by without others.
Many Lemmy instances block VPN posting. You can view, but not vote or post. I have a secondary private VPN I use sometimes for that. But honestly the whole thing just sucks.
ActivityPub does not share your IP with other instances, but of course, like all websites, your home instance can see your IP.