cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/2452085
This is, of course, assuming that the instance is not hosted on the same network that the device your account is using is accessing it from.
Very loosely it would act as a caching or proxy service from what I understand.
My understanding is that when you subscribe to community “x” on server “y”, that your server “z” starts to download all of the content from that community so it can serve it to you locally. I don’t know how fast the activitypub protocol would fetch new posts/comments, if it’s real-time, or some kind of intermittent pull or push.
What is your threat model or goal? It could hide the device you use to connect to the instance, however a lot of actions you do on Lemmy, including all upvotes, are public to other instances.
VPNs have multiple effects. Which ones are you asking about?
The common ones that come to mind are:
- Preventing remote servers from seeing your real IP address
- Bypassing attempts to block access to popular Lemmy servers, either by network operators or the server itself
It won’t do the former because media gets loaded directly from federated servers. It might do the latter.
Side note: if you’re doing it for privacy reasons, I was reading that self hosting for just yourself will allow people to see what communities you subscribe to, based on what communities are visible on your server.
This. Also, anybody who can identify you as the owner of the host (be it through Whois or through hosting service records) can associate your name to everything posted on that instance, thus profiling you, your tastes and your opinions easily (it’s insane the amount of personal information we can leak on social media, even when thinking we’re not). Clearly not something to do in countries where you can be harassed or worse for your opinions, and probably best avoided everywhere, if privacy is a concern for you. There is some virtue in being immersed in the masses (that’s actually a common anonymisation strategy, from merging streams comes plausible deniability).
