When I sign up under an instance, what information am I sharing to the host?
Privacy drove me off reddit, I looked around for these answers but not sure where to come across them.
Am I sharing my IP address/ location with my host instance?
is there a log of my view history
are there general privacy concerns that I am not thinking of?
I do not want to be in a position where a Government creates an instance, and allows them to monitor.
Ok, so by visiting a server you are sharing your IP (obviously you could use VPN/Tor to prevent that). By clicking your username I can see your posts but I cannot see what you view. I'm not even sure if a server admin could see that, but they could potentially correlate your IP with the pages you request. However, I don't think a server admin with federation would be able to see what you visit since the federated content is duplicated on your home server, so i think it would still only be visible to your server's admin. Not 100% sure tho, hopefully someone will chime in that knows more
But this is a great example of why you need to find a server admin you trust, because servers could also run modified lemmy code or be tracking user data, etc