Asklemmy

Lemmy, and ActivityPub in general, is quite bad for privacy. To the point where I doubt it'd be legal for a company to host a server within the EU. Everything is handled by volunteers and amateurs. Privacy policies are bog standard or barely enforced. You have no idea what servers are using and selling your information, and any server can follow basically any community.

The easier it is for someone to create a new account after getting kicked or banned, the more likely it is that other servers will block that server and leave you with a near useless Lemmy account.

your own self hosted one

~~[email protected] seems pretty active to me.~~

Sorry, misread privacy for piracy. I'll show myself out.

Privacy and social media don’t go together. Logs of your IP are the least of your worries.

Lemmy.ml requires no email. The only person who can doxx you is yourself.

I would think the most privacy friendly would be to make a random user and not give out too much info. There isn’t anything else other than email. Hosting your own instance doesn’t equal privacy either as it’s super obvious since all content on that instance is from that user lol

Given that all Lemmy instances are run by private individuals you should probably think about using a vpn (or dns proxy at the very least) to obfuscate your true location and data. This applies to any mainstream or corporate social media platform, obv.

After proving that I wasn't a bot via Matrix, sh.itjust.works activated my e-mail despite having an obviously bogus e-mail registered, so that's a plus.

What are your goals?

I would say it's really a combination of the instances policies and their jurisdiction, and in terms of jurisdiction it also depends on where you live (e.g. you may have more protections under law if the instance is hosted in your country)

There's also nothing stopping you from using multiple instances — siloing your interaction in different types of communities in different accounts on different instances. This may be useful if part of your privacy concerns are having all of your post / comment data on one account on one instance.

Edit: You can also use an email aliasing service to avoid even giving your email out. There are aliasing services such as Addy.io, Simplelogin (subsidiary of Proton AG), Firefox Relay (Mozilla), as well as some email providers which provide (iCloud, Proton, Mailbox.org to name a few)