Does self hosting an instance of a federated service, like lemmy, effectively act as a VPN for your account?

Deez , 10 months ago

Side note: if you’re doing it for privacy reasons, I was reading that self hosting for just yourself will allow people to see what communities you subscribe to, based on what communities are visible on your server.

Anafroj , 10 months ago

This. Also, anybody who can identify you as the owner of the host (be it through Whois or through hosting service records) can associate your name to everything posted on that instance, thus profiling you, your tastes and your opinions easily (it's insane the amount of personal information we can leak on social media, even when thinking we're not). Clearly not something to do in countries where you can be harassed or worse for your opinions, and probably best avoided everywhere, if privacy is a concern for you. There is some virtue in being immersed in the masses (that's actually a common anonymisation strategy, from merging streams comes plausible deniability).