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: Obligatory RIP my inbox.

  • sugar_in_your_teaEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    That’s only going to protect you from your instance admin or data breaches knowing your connection location and email.

    Most doxxing happens from user-submitted information. For example, you just mention the following:

    • the city you live in
    • your birthday
    • physical characteristics - hair color, height, etc

    Those can be done across a lot of comments, and someone can easily write a script to distill all of that into a list of details.

    My general strategy is:

    • don’t give someone a reason to dox me - i.e. be polite
    • recreate my account every so often - usually 1-2 years
    • lie frequently to make it harder to sift through
    • assume someone is going to try to dox me