If these catch on (unlikely imo) it's only a matter of time before I have an awkward interaction with someone when they come into my house wearing them...
Anyone know of a good managed hosting (or vps) for Immich that doesn't break the bank? I have about 5TB of photos/videos and I don't feel safe without a remote backup. I played with self hosting and I really (really) like Immich but I keep Google photos/Drive just to ensure I won't lose anything.
Or would concentrating my lemmy/piefed use strictly through a self-hosted one person instance account help to ensure nothing but what I’m ‘intentionally doing’ is tracked?
It would ensure that yes. The other instance would only see the IP of your instance, not browser information or anything else. I haven't tried selfhosting, so I can't speak to it's difficulty, but as far as I know, there is no reason to distrust any of the major Lemmy or Piefed instances. I'm not an expert and it is open source software so anyone could theoretically edit the code if they wanted.
And privacy refers to having control over who can see your personal information, anonymity means being unidentifiable.
A default installation of Lemmy/Piefed won't track users beyond what they intentionally do on the site. But if you want to be sure, then you can always host your own instance of one person. (In addition to all user activity), other instances can only see the IP of the instance the account is hosted on.
If you want something to be private then well, don't post to the public web (as a reminder- DMs aren't private on Piefed/Lemmy). If you want to be anonymous, then use a VPN and don't repeat a username you used elsewhere.
ok