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.
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.
Hey thanks. I'm trying to be more mindful of how tech interacts with my life, and as a non techie, I appreciate you doing this, and I found it to be useful information even for my idiot self, even if only to understand the lemmyverse a little better.
Fyi As a (non-lemmy) backend developer, this is completely normal/standard use of IP addresses in a system not designed around harvesting your personal data. IP addresses are commonly used for efficiently and securely (security for the server more than you) handling active (inflight) requests so you generally only see it in specific network logs like those of the reverse proxy, not stored long term in a DB. Most of us who aren't in advertising or government want to know as little about you as possible.
Being privacy mindful is good, but it is a deep and creepy rabbit hole to go down. Stay safe out there 🙂.
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.
Interesting! Mastodon surfaces those things? But still just within an instance and not across them as activitypub itself doesn't include such metadata (or it's extensible enough that's moot?) I wonder why? You wouldn't need to expose the IP to admins to offer them the ability to add it to a blocklist...
Sorry for replying late; I just saw this question.
It's worth noting that images that people include in their posts are hosted on their instance, not your home instance. That means the admins of those other instances can see your IP address and (normally) page you were reading when your browser loads those images.
Browser extensions exist that will let you block off-site images if you want to.
Good point! And ya, when I open umatrix on a comment thread I see a whole menagerie of instances serving me images as I guess that goes for the profile image too.
But I find that somehow less concerning as they just know "someone at this IP viewed this thread containing these images" than "the user at this IP wrote this comment (or post)".
Hmmm, but if DMs allow images and they work like this, a user with their own instance who wants to know which IP wrote a comment could perhaps send a message to the author with a unique image...
Yeah, it can be abused. I don't want to raise an alarm about it because I don't think it's worth scaring people who are just dipping their toes in the fediverse waters, and because it can be fixed.
For now, I block remote images by default and allow them from a few specific instances.