Any joe shmoe can spin up an instance, post your personal details (or personal details they made up), and bada bing bada boom, your identity is compromised forever.
Replace "instance" with "website" and that's how the internet works. There are avenues in the legal system to combat this, but generally people can post speech (illegal or not) very easily with the internet, having rapid, free, open communication is a net positive for society even if occasionally there are downsides.
Lemmy can't solve doxxing or other forms of abuse any better than a centralized service can, which they don't do particularly well as it is. What Lemmy does do it put control over what content is promoted into the hands of users and instance admins, as opposed to a few execs at Meta. If an instance has poor moderation, it will be 'de-federated' by other lemmy instances, which means content from their instance won't travel across the fediverse. So in general, I think you can expect good moderation. Unlike centralized services, instance admins are not incentivized to shove polarizing content and misinformation into your feed. That pipeline of increasingly polarizing content is the root cause of many situations which involve doxxing in the first place.
I don’t care so much if my personal info is posted to a website like kiwifarms or someone’s private blog, because those websites are harder to find in search results
So is most of Lemmy
Big companies have a desire to protect themselves from prosecution for hosting illegal activity.
So do Lemmy instance hosters, the hosting companies they use, and the other instances which federate with them.
They specifically hire people to moderate content and reduce their liability.
Once can expect lemmy instances to do this once they reach a certain size. If you don't moderate sufficiently, you get de-federated, and your users won't want to use your instance, so lemmy instances which want to grow will keep a handle on good moderation,
But she can run a Lemmy instance that will federate with the entire rest of the fediverse and expose her content to potentially thousands of people.
If she posts it to a lemmy community the mod that community or instance will remove it. If she hosts her own instance for the purposes of doxxing people nobody will even see the post (since it's not getting upvoted across fedi) and other instances will de-federate.
Ultimately, if you are at high risk of doxxing, the best measures to protect yourself are mostly based not around which platforms you trust or not, but around engaging with those platforms in a way which protects your privacy. Might want to check out the surveillance self-defense guide. https://ssd.eff.org/
Even on Reddit there are mirror websites designed to preserve deleted content, and there’s also the internet archive and Google cache, screenshots, etc.
Once information is posted online it’s available. It can be obfuscated or loosely scrubbed, but you can never know it’s clean.
