Lots of steps to “figure it out”. Could’ve just pinged the hostname.

Not a big secret. Pretty sure they even announced it.

Lemmy isn’t just “one thing”. Every instance has its own rules and standards. Lemmy itself has zero policy with regards to free speech, for or against. Nor does the Fediverse as a whole.

You can start your own Lemmy instance and have all the free speech you want.

As has been pointed out previously, this isn’t about censorship. It’s about low quality posting. Even if the information is completely valid your post to Reddit violated the sub rules and your low effort conspiracy postings on Lemmy serve no value.

Lemmy, itself, does NOT collect or store IP addresses. You won't find this information in the Lemmy database/application.

However, your IP address will be captured in the webserver logs themselves, which is typical for any connections to any webserver.

So your premise is that somebody is listening in on your conversations and then using that information to insert stock items into your local grocery store?

In addition to the reasons already mentioned, Apple has a requirement that applications have a novel component. While it's often questionable as to what is considered "novel" Weather applications get contrasted against the built-in weather app. If the app simply duplicates the functionality it will be rejected.

There's plenty of us here but we're not as noticeable. We're old enough that we've learned to stop incessantly complaining about shit that doesn't matter yet not so old that all we do is incessantly complain about shit that doesn't matter.

Circle of life.

I'm an older X. Another ten years and I'll be on my porch yelling "get off my lawn" and "not in my backyard", carrying on the tradition laid out by my forefathers.

Yes.

Just muddling around I've built queries that: (a) list all of my post & comments, everybody who voted on them, and their votes (b) tally how many times specific users have upvoted or downvoted me. (c) identifies the most prolific voters across the Fediverse and the communities they are voting in (d) identifies users with the same username or display name across all instances and correlates the activities across those accounts.

These are all for the sake of learning and are innocuos the way I'm using them. It is plain to see that someone with skills and an agenda could make more out of it than I have.

The problem with that is that every interaction that any user has with a post or a comment would require calls back to the home instance in order to lookup those usernames. That's a LOT of extra load

You can’t connect to an arbitrary instance but you CAN create your own instance and audit anything that gets federated to it.

Yes. While I see no reason that private message would exist anywhere other than the instance of the sender and receiver, the admins of those instances CAN see the contents of the message and whether or not they have been read.

Anybody with access to the database on ANY instance. It would be pretty easy to surface in the UI if someone was so inclined to code it.

Some people understand that. Most people have no idea how email works.