aski3252

Yeah that is indeed true unfortunately. I think small communities will be around eventually, it just takes time.

Did you even bother to read the sidebar and rules before you joined lemmy.world?

Lemmy.world doesn't allow for discrimination, racism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. It doesn't even allow for name calling and requires posts with controversial topics to declare that it is a controversial topic.. In other words, most lemmy servers, especially the lemmy server you have chosen to join, have much stricter moderation rules than reddit, twitter, etc..

If you don't want "snowflake crap", you should probably join another instance, or host your own server where you make the rules.. And you are free to do so, but demanding that a server, which you don't own and have no control over, panders to your specific wishes seems a bit entitled..

One could even say that your attitude seems a bit "snow-flaky"..

You are only going to see how truthful the platform is when the owners get a court demand or law enforcement at their doors.

Wait, so you expect a site admin to openly resist a court order and/or law enforcement when illegal activity takes place? And what does that have to do with "honesty"? There is a reason why servers like this have rules such as "don't request or link to specific pirated titles". It's because they don't want to get in trouble with the law.. And for good reason, they aren't superman after all, they cannot fight the law..

And surely we can agree that there are cases where providing law enforcement with information on illegal activity is not only the legal thing to do, but also the moral thing to do.

Yep, anytime anyone accesses anything on the internet, there are certain privacy concerns to be had. They are generally not an issue if you aren't being reckless, but there is still always a risk.

If you are worried about anyone knowing your IP, the only way to avoid that is to not access the internet at all. The IP address is the address which is used to send you data, which is a necessity if you want to access anything. When you access a website for example, you are asking the web server to send you a webpage which you then see on your screen, otherwise you could not see it. In order for the server to send you that webpage, it needs your IP.

It's as if you asked "If I order a package online, do they know my address?". Well yes, they have to know your address, otherwise they cannot send you the package.

building trust with a host.

This is indeed one of the risks with lemmy and other federated, decentralized and self-hosted services. Those services are generally hosted by hobbyists, not by companies, which seemingly makes it a bit harder to evaluate if you can trust a given server or not.

But it's worth it to keep in mind that even though companies generally have a lot more resources to take care of security, there are still a lot of examples where they simply don't do that, for example to cut cost. You also have no idea who works as an admin at "socialmediacompany x". For example, there are a lot of admins working at twitter or reddit who you have never heard about (and never will hear about) who probably have access to your data.

And companies often just sell your data, an issue that you probably don't have to worry with lemmy anytime soon (hopefully).

The way I deal with that and why I don't worry very much about lemmy is to take care about what information I share. I don't care that a server admin could theoretically find out which country I'm from through my IP. I don't post sensitive information and I don't send sensitive direct messages. I use throw away e-mail addresses. I also don't plan on reading illegal content. And I don't feel attached to a specific server/lemmy instance, I don't care if my account is lost.

Am I sharing my IP address/ location with my host instance?

Yes. If you connect to any server whatsoever, the server will have to know your IP, otherwise it can not send any data to you and the whole connection cannot be established. With your IP, one can figure out your (rough) location.

is there a log of my view history

As far as I can tell, yes. There is the option "show read posts" in your option menu which hides posts you have already read. In order for this to work, your read history has to be saved somewhere.

are there general privacy concerns that I am not thinking of?

There are always privacy concerns when accessing/using any service or server on the internet, at the end of the day it comes down to protecting yourself and using services you trust.

A potentially specific issue with federated, decentralized and self-hosted services such as lemmy is that the people who are running the servers are mostly hobbyists. Most will probably also work in IT professionally, but in general, people who host lemmy are doing it in their spare time at their own cost. This could potentially mean that they have less resources to secure their servers and the data on it than a multi-million dollar company.

Another thing to keep in mind on lemmy is that private/direct messages are not encrypted, which means that server admins can read your direct messages (there is a warning about this when you write a direct message).

I do not want to be in a position where a Government creates an instance, and allows them to monitor.

I'm not quite sure if I understand your worry here correctly. In general, most of the content that is posted on lemmy is publicly available anyway, so they wouldn't even need an account to get that information, let alone their own instance.

And if governments have an issue with a user where they want information on a user, they can just contact the site admin and demand the information from them. So if you are planning on posting stuff that is considered illegal where you are from or if you are planning to access content that is considered illegal, Lemmy is probably a bad place to do that

The sorting algorithm seems like it needs a bit of work. I don't have the issue that I see month old posts, I tend to see very new and not very upvoted posts instead, but that's fine with me. I just saw your post on hot near the top page, for example.

I was only active on certain small subreddits, here I am active in more different communities.

Yes, I absolutely use adblock, I couldn't imagine browsing without it. I support creators I like by donating them money or joining their patreon.

Completely agree, this whole entitled attitude about "we left reddit because censoreship hurr durr, now u do same thing, you have to do what we tell you" is really annoying..

Nobody is censoring you, you are free to join and visit whatever instances you want and watch their content.. You can even host your own instance where you federate with whoever you want, you have free access to the code.. But nobody is forced to host ANY content they don't want on the server THEY themselves pay for..

I don't host a lemmy instance yet, but I host other services and I do it mainly for fun. As far as I have read, a small scale lemmy instance runs very well on very low performance hardware, which means the cost of running it is probably less than 10 $ a month.

The big lemmy instances that need better hardware have patreons and other services where people can donate money.

Duckduckgo as default. If I need location/region specific stuff, I will sometimes use google.