Lemmy isn't a privacy or anonymity service.
However, it isn't rolling out ads or other dystopian tech so it has that going for it
this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2026
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Privacy
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A community for Lemmy users interested in privacy
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The big difference is:
On the Fediverse, some random person now has your email and IP address (if you use neither an disposable email nor a VPN). This person has no special access to any other data, meaning that outside of legal proceedings with courts involved (or your email address being publicly connected to your identity), they do not have the ability to even find out who you are.
On corporate Social Media, the people who got your email and IP have a lot more resources to build a comprehensive model of your behavior and psychology, use intensive profiling regarding your devices, and have money to buy datasets for finetuning their knowledge, then sell off access to your eyeballs to the highest bidder, while all the time making sure to keep you engaged with whatever tricks they can play on you.
None of the real-life consequences of using corporate social media have even the slightest chance of also being an issue on the Fediverse. The servers aren't even really interesting targets for Cyberattacks, because the best you get is a handful (if we are not talking lemmy.world, mostly somewhere sub-500) email addresses.
Like you are publishing publicly, if you dont share your private life you are private. Fediverse doesn't force you.
A lot of good replies here but yeah, the Fediverse isn't really designed for Privacy at all. Apart from that of course everything you post is public and distributed to other servers, something that is less obvious is that so is your votes. This is data that absolutely can reveal a lot about you and your interestes and it's also distributed to all instances that participate in a thread, and visible to admins, or anyone through sites like https://lemvotes.org/
Some data is a bit more protected, as you mention the email address would only be made known to your home instance. Same applies to your IP address. Chat / Direct Messages are also fairly private, but not end-2-end encrypted so it will be available to admins of your home instance and the instance of the users you're sending a message to.
At least instances are not ad-funded (at least I haven't seen anyone running ads), so it's less likely that your browsing pattern is also sent to some ad network to build a personalized profile.. That said, circling back to the votes being distributed to all instances it also wouldn't be that hard to build profiles on users.
Yeah, realizing that if number one worry for one is privacy, reddit might be more private which is kinda backwards. Most private of course to not use any at all.
Aside, kinda going for the worry about server admins being funny. It is funny to find the server admin of the server I joined commenting on my question about privacy on a community they don't follow. I'll give you the benefit of doubt, you are most likely tech enthused dev who follows these communities through some feeds or something, but still, funny.
This community is pretty active and hits the “All” feed often.
The fediverse is much smaller than Reddit. It’s not an indictment of the admin to have found your post. It’s not like they went seeking you out specifically or something.
Reddit literally asks for ID verification and blocks VPNs, so it's not an all or nothing answer.
commenting on my question about privacy on a community they don't follow
How do you know they don't follow it?
Some stranger somewhere would have my email and be able to monitor everything I do and say.
That's the trust you are giving on literally anything you do on the Internet. Behind every service, server, app, whatever, is some (or multiple) strangers that have potential access to your data. If you don't want your email to leak here specifically, use either a throwaway email or register on an instance that does not require email.
Still, there is a difference on a company with a public leadership whose names are known, and who have to follow laws and mark down their privacy notice publicly.
Any for profit organization will give a fuck about laws only for as long as it does not interfere with what they want to do to get more profit, and as long as the penalty is bigger than whatever profit they expect to gain. As a regular person any fine usually is some significant portion of your paycheck, and lawyers are fucking expensive as well - that's why you won't do anything bad. For an organization that potentially has several hired lawyers and a whole legal department the fine becomes a cost-benefit calculation and they'll use any legal loophole to fuck you over if they feel like it.
If a server admin gets funny with the data, I'm shit out of luck.
I'd argue that a lemmy server admin has more to lose (e.g. reputation, users leaving for other instances and defederation) than reddit.
Something you might not be aware of: Lemmy (and other fediverse servers) are based on ActivityPub, so really dumbed down and short, servers provide a feed of what happened (a post, a comment, whatever), other servers that are federated read this feed and replicate the appropriate data on their instance and show it to their users. But, other servers might ignore it, by accident, by a software bug, by malice, or for whatever reason. So if you post something and e.g. delete it, other instances might take their sweet time to delete it, or simply never do, and there is nothing you can do about it. Just as a heads up.
My personal impression is that people use an email not easily traced to their identity, if they are concerned about that.
You should also be aware, even more than on commercial social media, that what you say and post is essentially public property. Due to the nature of federation it is rather difficult to track down and remove all instances of your content from any and all servers it was federated to, if you wanted to do so.
I promise you any email you've ever used on the internet is public and associated with your person. That shit leaks out of companies the way an open container leaks when you turn it upside down.
That's easy to see evidence of via the Spam folder getting more active the longer you use the same email account, can use email aliases for a better chance to figure out who-dun-it but it's usually compromised hacked servers.
On the negative side:
- All votes are public on Lemmy but that's not made obvious to the users.
- Your whole history is public with no control over that. If someone wanted to pull that data via the API, then feed it to AI and build a profile on you, they easily can.
On the positive side:
- Not every instance even requires that you give your email address to the admins. Some require it but allow to remove it after the fact (so if your account gets hacked or there's a leak, that data might not leak).
- While AI can be trained on your comments and build a profile on you, it's not a given that it will be. On reddit, that's done by default, with no way to opt out.
- Every instance being independent means that even if the admins of one abuse their power or do things you disagree with, you can just switch to a different one.
- Practically no access restrictions. You can read without an account. You can use a VPN. You can have countless alts. You can use any app of choice.
The upside with having a profile history is that it allows for transparency. Unless you are using some specialty platform there will always be an account history.
Not every instance even requires that you give your email address to the admins.
True, but a lot of instances like Lemmy.World use that as one of their criteria to decide if they should block an instance
From a scroll through their list of blocked instances, I'm not so sure. Judging by the names, it's mostly not serious instances and the tankie instances known for harassment. One search for "lemmy instance no email" leads to reddthat, and that's not blocked by .world despite being among the most active (thus more likely to attract spam or abuse according to that theory).
Use a throwaway email: https://www.emailondeck.com/
That's what I did. I don't want to recover my account if anything goes wrong, my password manager is here for that purpose. I'm only here to talk, not create an "internet presence."
PieFed.zip did a big password reset recently, so here I am with a fresh account. No regrets - these accounts are disposable. Karma is meaningless. Just post.
Everything you post anywhere on the internet is public info. Doesn't matter if it's 4chan or Instagram. In my opinion though, Lemmy isn't large enough to warrant targeted data mining and user identification.
I do not discuss private details here and try and be as vague as possible in all posts. What you reveal is up to you.
First, welcome here!
Regarding anonymity, feel free to use an alias service like https://unbox.at/ or https://addy.io/ . That allows you to stay anonymous even from the admin.
I thought about those or just making one use email, but decided not to want the hassle. After a lot of thinking about it, I don't consider this to be that major of a privacy threat. I just used an old email reserved for trash that probably can't connect to me.
Lemmy is built to be scraped in as many ways as possible (public APIs for both clients and servers), and you can probably tell that a vocal minority scoff at the idea you deserve privacy either here or anywhere. That includes with votes and voting patterns.
This attitude of entitlement to your data will extend across most of the Fediverse and to other similar federated services. It's like something is in the water.
Yes, votes being public is probably my biggest gripe with Lemmy.
It enables a very detailed dragnet of user profile data. There is nothing public at the moment, but I expect it's a matter of time before organizations start building detailed user profiles that consider how users vote each post and comment to build psychoanalytical profiles. In addition to the user's public posts and comments it would make for a highly privacy-invasive dataset.
People don't care much yet because Lemmy is small still and under the radar, but with the data there for the taking its a matter of time.
Rotating alts is probably the easiest way to reduce profiling. And that can be either switching one main account every few months, or rotate between different alts depending on topics.
I'll probably end up doing what I used to do with Reddit and simply delete my account every year and start anew. I've been too lazy to do that yet on Lemmy tho.
Additional benefit: it can be an opportunity to give a try to another instance!
I want to build on what rose said.
Privacy here does not exist. If everyone can see, then everyone can see...
We are here for avoidance of corporate ownership and how they directly exploit us. There is 0 protections against them expoiting us really. (But us)
We block who we want to not see, they will still see you. If a stalker chased you, you block them, you won't see them, and a mod hopefully will help, but they are smarter to not.... Because they aren't blocking IP addresses, they are blocking a username which any new one can come from anywhere.. so what's best?
Society rejecting a person means more than a mod rejecting one. I'm sure many want them blocked/banned/gone, it really it's stupid. Keep them where they are, identify them, and recogze a person as what they are.
I don't want to know Trump is called Paul Tommorow, I want to recognize a rapist by his name. Ban him, he comes back as Paul