Looked through the docs a bit and it’s not really clear to me: I’m posting this on lemmy.ca, does that mean only that instance knows my IP? Or does every instance it federates with get my ip alongside this post?

This seems maybe important, did I miss a privacy guide to Lemmy someplace? Cursory searching didn’t come up with much official. Are there other aspects we should be thinking about here? I’d come across some mention of deleted posts being still available everywhere they were sent but that sorta makes sense – hard to “unpublish” anything.

  • I gave a cursory look at the source code.

    So, from what I can tell, nobody can see your IP address through Lemmy. But the person who runs the server that your Lemmy instance runs on can trace IPs by looking at access logs. That doesn’t get shared with other servers, or even people who adminster your Lemmy instance but don’t have access to the underlying server.

    • Great, thanks for this. I did glance there but saw the migrations and blithely presumed I’d have to run them to see the resulting schema.

      And ya, there’s no way I can connect to an instance without revealing my IP to whoever controls that host, I’d be on a VPN if I was that concerned. Mostly just wanted to confirm someone with a self-hosted instance and a script kiddie hobby wouldn’t be able to directly mess with the system of whichever hapless commentor says something they take umbrage at.