I know that as leftists, participating in online communities requires a certain level of discretion. I’m admittedly not as privacy focused as I probably should be, but I would like to at least minimize the chances of being put on someone’s list. Do I need a VPN every time I open this site or do I just need to be careful of what I post?
Just don’t post personally identifiable information about yourself.
Send me your login information so I can keep it safe it you and recommend new passwords.
Apart from if I would post some really messed up things, I don’t consider myself in any less danger here versus in real life, where I am a very active member of a communist party. Posting here is not going to do anything worse for my safety.
This always comes up and I’m staunchly in this camp rather than the super security groups. Besides the basic “don’t doxx yourself” and “don’t admit to crimes” stuff for every online community I don’t think there’s any special harm to participating over here. If people are big enough to be an issue to the authorities, they’ll probably be noticeable enough irl or in other websites too.
But obviously use a VPN always (even out of here), specially if you’re in that one country where corporations are very free in what they can do with your internet usage data. ProtonVPN is partially free and Nord is very cheap.
I am generally in this camp as well; my attitude in my online life pretty closely mirrors that in my real life. People who know me in person know I am an active communist, that even includes some of my bosses, nobody really cares.
I am not going to give out my specific address more than is available in my profile, but I just make it a point to not post anything online that I wouldn’t tell a stranger in person. If I post it online and somebody traces it back to me…I don’t particularly care. Doesn’t mean I want to start getting NAFO death threats, but they also have the attention span of a termite.
If there is something I really cared about keeping private, I just don’t mention it to anybody anywhere.
I’d like to think Lemmygrad’s operators keep their connection logs fairly well-protected, and store as little user data as possible.
I’d honestly be more concerned about opsec (operational security). For example, you might post in an apolitical thread about how you live outside of a city, you work at a local coffee shop, or maybe your username is “redcarowner69”. There’s three facts about you that someone with too much free time (or nation-state funding) can begin to arrange.
If you’re interested learning opsec, step 0 is learning to threat model. Figure out what situations you’re trying to prevent, what actors or forces may cause those situations to happen, and what your options are for stopping them, and what the costs of each of those options are. Then you can make an informed decision. Privacy is a gradual adaptation, not a switch you can flip overnight or ever be perfect at. It involves a lot of tradeoffs.
First, don’t post any personal information or any identifying information. No pictures of local scenery, or any text describing where you live or your culture or ethnicity.
Second, don’t reference any accounts you’ve previously had. Never give any info to reference accounts. Also, create multiple accounts to spread out your information in case you post any identifying information, so it’s difficult to piece together. All my accounts across multiple platforms have less than a year of activity.
Third, don’t post anything inciting. If you’re going to post stuff that’s likely going to be picked up by filters, use a euphemism or leave it as an implication. It takes effort to dox someone, or to pin an account to an actual person. Don’t make it “worth it” for them.
Fourth, use browser based solutions, and not dedicated apps. and don’t use a browser where you can log into like chrome. Firefox is a good alternative.
If someone really wants to find you, the info is always out there, whether it’s your chromium browser linked to your google account that’s recording what you type, or your Apple OS, etc. but to requisition and to compile that data takes time and effort.
The third one is a big one. The others honestly won’t really get you noticed by anyone, but the third one, that will, and if you’ve broken rules 1 and 2 already, the feds can find you easily.
It depends where you live. Some countries have stricter censorship than others. Unless you are making some extreme calls to actions or what might be construed as a threat you should be fine.
You should use a VPN anywhere you’d prefer not to be identified and Tor if you really don’t want to be identified, but that’s not enough to decouple your account from your personal identity; you’d need to create a new account that you only use through Tor and be very careful with what you post, at the very least (I wrote a summary of my setup somewhere if you’re interested, but it’s probably a hassle for most people). With that said, if you’re already openly communist, using Lemmygrad is unlikely to expose you to further danger
Did not expect to get so many answers so quickly. Thank you all.
Does anyone know if Lemmy strips exif days and such from images?
AFAIK it does. But you should be sure and run every picture and document through a program such as mat2 first or Exif Cleaner.
Basedness overload (turn off phone in case of emergency)
