I recently learned that voting on lemmy is not anonymous. Anyone can get information about who has upvoted and downvoted a post or comment.
In combination with your IP, this is a massive privacy (maybe even physical security) risk. Also, people can target you for your votes.
Sadly, this is something where I would prefer Reddit over Lemmy. Big tech scrapes data from both places anyways, at least Reddit is safe.
So would an oppressive government be able to simply set up their own instance and identify the IPs of lurker dissidents based on what they up/downvote?
Only if said lurker registered on their specific instance. Only piefed.world can correlate your ip with your user and only sopuli.xyz can do it for mine.
lemmy.world never gets our ip from what we post. They could see that an ip accessed a picture they host but not with a username attached. (same as every webserver can)
No you have to run the instance.
I do think it’s hilarious that all these users think the majority of admins are going to do jail time protecting your data.