this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2021
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Privacy

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I haven't hosted my own matrix server yet. is it safe to join an instance? I don't really know how private that would be. the question is when I signup/login would I be giving out my IP? is the metadata private? sorry for asking this, I'm just a bit paranoid

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[โ€“] [email protected] 12 points 4 years ago* (last edited 4 years ago) (1 children)

You have to trust the instance admin you are joining; the same goes for Lemmy/Mastodon/XMPP. The instance owner can see your IP address, your devices, email etc. They can act on your behalf - so basically they have a fair amount of control over your account. But they cannot see any encrypted content. These issues are a bit hard to solve in case of something like Matrix often at performance costs; same goes for the metadata issue.

If you want to self host you can run a de-federated instance for only personal use or you can run it as a onion hidden service - this way the metadata issue is solved. But note that Synapse is pretty resource intensive.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 4 years ago (1 children)

This is not true, knowing that you can verify yourself before talking to others and they can't just willinilly act on your behalf because they're not coming from the same device.