I know how to deal with doxxing on traditional social media. I either report the comment or delete my comment, and if the platform doesn’t have moderators I trust, then I don’t use it.
But on the fediverse, anyone on any instance can reveal some personal information and it has to be deleted on every instance in order to be cleared for everyone. 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.
I don’t trust the admins of sites like Reddit and Facebook very much, but I trust them a lot more than the instance admin of lemmy.eightyeight.nazi, or whatever other instance run by people who want to hurt me for who I am. And what if an admin is just busy and just doesn’t have time to check reports, or it’s an unmoderated instance run by an admin who gave up on Lemmy but didn’t unplug their server?
Do I have to trust every single person on the internet with basic server admin knowledge in order to use the fediverse?
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 and will only be reached by people who already have intent to do harm. It’s called security through obscurity. It’s not a good thing if info gets leaked on these sites, but it’s a more manageable problem. They’d have to go to a more public website in order to leak it to strangers, and that’s when I could do something about it. Big companies have a desire to protect themselves from prosecution for hosting illegal activity. They specifically hire people to moderate content and reduce their liability.
Karen Doe isn’t thinking about lawsuits or liability, and she probably doesn’t have a good grasp of the legal system. 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. And getting Karen Doe off the main parts of the fediverse requires I make a personally persuasive argument to EVERY large instance owner, most of whom are volunteers, aren’t paid, and don’t really care. Some of them don’t even like me as a person to begin with, because they’re right wing and I’m trans. They might have me banned or blocked. So what am I supposed to do about Karen?
So is most of Lemmy
So do Lemmy instance hosters, the hosting companies they use, and the other instances which federate with them.
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,
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/