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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I'm not worried about upvotes or downvotes being seen by anyone, but I am very worried about other personal info being seen by any admins. I have a very real, very scary stalker, and if all they had to do was create an instance to see my private information...
To be clear, I know that's not what's currently happening, but it feels like a bit of a slippery slope when pretty much anyone can become an admin and things aren't super secure yet.
I'm kind of regretting giving my email to sign up, now. I just don't know enough about this stuff to know whether or not that's a valid concern.
It's almost certainly fine. Emails are not shared to other instances.
However, when you go around the internet giving your email address to random sites, eventually you're gonna hit the wrong site and at the very least end up with a bunch of spam or having your email sold to advertisers. It's a good idea to use an email privacy service - basically when you sign up for things like newsletters or random sites you generate a new random email, then if anyone emails that email it gets forwarded to your actual email address. Some of the services even let you reply to the email and they make it look like you relied from the alias.
We're on different instances and links can be funny at the moment so I'll copy a recent post I did:
You install an extension in your browser then you can generate emails whenever you need.
Personally I pay for Firefox Relay, which has a small free tier (I think 5 emails) but the paid version is $10 for a year which I think is worth it.
Thank you, that's very reassuring! I was able to go in after the fact and delete my email from my account, though I'm not sure how much good that will do. I'm definitely going to look into those, the Firefox relay in particular sounds pretty user friendly. I don't know when I lost my tech savvy, but it's getting harder and harder to keep up with things these days.
Speaking of which, does Lemmy remind anyone else of irc? The organized chaos has been giving me deja vu and I think I just realized why...
I'm pretty sure editing the email removes the record. In general, editing updates the database with the new value while deleting things marks a record in the database as deleted (e.g. so a mod can un-delete something that was accidentally deleted by a mod). Editing the email adress to remove it should just clear that field in the database. Of course your instance will have backups, but they won't keep them forever.
Things are moving faster and faster these days! I'm not sure that anyone keeps up with everything new.
You're not the first person to make that connection!