Privacy drove me off reddit, I looked around for these answers but not sure where to come across them.
Am I sharing my IP address/ location with my host instance?
is there a log of my view history
are there general privacy concerns that I am not thinking of?
I do not want to be in a position where a Government creates an instance, and allows them to monitor.
You need to separate what the instance owner sees vs what other federated instances see about you.
The instance owner will have access to everything, including your IP and view history. That is true for every website.
Other instance owners could potentially see what content you fetch from them. Not always, because usually it’s them sending the info over to your server, but there are “signed fetch requests” that the ActivityPub protocol supports and become relevant when you try to load content your instance hasn’t seen before.
Your upvotes and downvotes are currently also visible across instances.
The best way to use the fediverse is with a pseudonymous account with a username that isn’t tied to your identity.