A friendly reminder to everyone to check out ArchiveBox if you’re looking for a self-hosted archiving solution. I’ve been using it for a while now and it works great; it can be a little rough around the edges at times, but I think it’s a wonderful tool. It’s allowed me to continue saving pages during the Internet Archive’s outage.

Sorry for the late response, but yes, I believe you can. There is an option in the config called allow_public_upload which can be changed to true or false.

Use Mullvad, unless you absolutely require port forwarding.

As another commenter said, it’s not possible to verify. You’ll just have to take each instance’s word for it.

Instance lists for some privacy front-ends will point out additonal info, such as if each instance is using CloudFlare or not (this may or may not be useful depending on if you distrust CloudFlare), some other services (like Rimgo, a private Imgur frontend) lets the instance hoster customize the privacy policy. But once again, this is all relying on the instance host telling the truth.

YaCy, Mwmbl, Alexandria, Stract, Marginalia to name a few.

I assume 4chan does not sell your data with 3rd parties (it pays the bills from user donations and people who buy a ‘4chan pass’, I think advertisers might’ve pulled out from the site long ago, given its vulgar nature) however it does appear to comply with law enforcement. See this 4chan user who was sending death threats to a Florida sheriff on 4chan, and was later arrested for this: https://www.thedailybeast.com/tyler-meyer-busted-for-threatening-sheriff-mike-chitwood-on-4chan

I believe it’s possible that 4chan had given this user’s IP address to law enforcement. 4chan records your IP address when you post, and only administrators can see it: https://4chan.org/faq#postanon

You can also look at the Wikipedia entry for 4chan, similar users have been arrested for making these death threats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan

I don’t advocate for what these users do, it’s harmful, and they honestly have it coming when they get arrested–but it shows that if 4chan is compelled to reveal your information, they will.

It’s not possible to post under a VPN by default, they’re blocked site-wide to combat spam and automated posts, even though there’s already a captcha when you post? I guess they’re just trying to play it extra safe. You can post under a VPN if you buy the 4chan pass (https://www.4chan.org/pass), however 4chan does not support any privacy-centric options like Monero or even cold hard physical cash, which means even if you post under a VPN, you can still be linked to your posts via payment method.

Me personally? I lurk on there every once in a while, but I’ve never posted, for these reasons. At least I can post under a VPN on Lemmy.

Yes, I torrent on the same machine where all my personal stuff is. The biggest reason for this is that I don’t have a dedicated machine to torrent 24/7, though I’d definitely like to set that up at some point. I like being able to seed niche torrents to those who need them, and a machine seeding 24/7 would definitely help with that. Also having easy simple access to the downloaded files is always a plus, but there’s a myriad of ways to do this over a local network (pretty sure some torrenting clients even have an option to torrent over LAN).

My torrent client is bound to my VPN’s network interface, and my VPN has a killswitch as well, so I’m not paranoid that things will suddenly leak. Been running this setup for months now without issues.

Yes, Proton Mail Bridge. I use it with KMail, works pretty well, I’d say.

Edit: I think this client is only for desktop, however. Android users will have to find another option.