YSK: Your Lemmy activities (e.g. downvotes) are far from private
i.imgur.com
Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)...
What you see via the UI isn't "all that exists". Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see "under the hood". Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won't normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.
Edit: To clarify, not just YOUR instance admin gets this info. This is ANY instance admin across the Fediverse.
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Not that I don't agree but there is a pretty big citation needed there.
We don't really know how secure Reddit Servers are and their attack surface is likely to be far larger.
You're right that we don't know how secure Reddit servers are. But I would bet that they're more secure than some instances that are hosted on someone's personal home network. My statement wasn't an authoritative fact, but it was a well educated guess based off of real world data.
Reddits servers are under attack all the time, and its amazing that Reddit wasn't down literally every day from attacks. Yes Reddit was successfully hacked before. Probably multiple times we don't kniw about. However, I repeat that the security on whatever network they have their servers on is probably more than the security that average Joe Schmuck has on his Lemmy instance he runs from his house. I would imagine that like any business with server farms that isnt massive like Microsoft, Reddit probably rents servers at a farm. Some Lemmy instance hosters might do this, but I guarantee you that a lot of Lemmy instances are hosted from a home network, which is inherently less secure. The server farms follow rigorous cybersecurity protocols, Joe Schmuck probably left his NetGear router admin password as the default password sonce he bought it 7 years ago and hasnt updated its firmware since.
I'm pretty sure that most lemmy instances run on a VPS, where the only thing you actually have to worry about usually is securing SSH, i.e. only using keys and setting up fail2ban. After that it's only a matter of securing lemmy the software itself, which is a whole other discussion.
Lemmy support is full of people tripping over themselves because they didn’t change the lines in the default docker-compose that the docs explicitly say “You must change this to match your environment”.
“The only thing you actually have to worry about” is doing a lot of heavy lifting.