Of course you can still be fired instantly for huge mistakes but it’s difficult to prove for them which is why I’ve never seen it used.

I have seen it a few times, but there have to be severe and generally repeated offenses, though you can get fired instantly for stuff like serious stealing from the company. But then again, there was once a dude who tried to start a fist fight with his bosses’ boss, which apparently wasn’t enough for him to get fired instantly.

As far as I know this is standard at least in western Europe, I believe it is required by law, but it could also be defined in general contracts.

And it’s not just for the employer, it’s mostly for the worker since if you get fired, the employer needs a good reason (repeated or severe breach or contract) to immediately end the contract. So unless you fuck up severely, they still have to pay you for 3 months while you are looking for a job.

And in practice, most are aware that during this time period, they effectively can’t really control you all that much. Sure, if you just don’t show up for work at all or obviously breache the contract, they don’t have to pay you, but otherwise, what are they gonna do, fire you?

In some jobs you can essentially get 3 additional months of paid vacation if they don’t need you to teach the new guy or if they are scared that you could be a pain in the ass, so they just send you home while they pay you for 3 months.

Well it’s not bad in theory, it just runs like ass… This version already runs 10 times faster than the real thing, sometimes I wonder what the hell is going on over at Microsoft.

I mean I couldn’t do that either, not for very long at least. I have the tendency to walk around aimlessly when doing something like that (same when I’m on the phone), which means I have to clean the floor after. So mostly I either brush my theeth in the shower or I sit down/lie down.

Damn, I just noticed that my theeth brushing habits are probably very weird, bit hey, at least that way I do it 2 - 3 times a day.

I used to fuck around with desktop shortcuts for fun. For example, replacing the internet browser shortcut with a shortcut to a script that starts the browser, but also does other weird stuff, often only after a certain time.

So somebody would “start the browser” and every 30 seconds, the script would open another browser window, or word, or close a browser window, or shut down the computer, etc.

I thought it was just harmless fun that was easy to fix and figure out, but the school IT would look everywhere to fix the strange issues and believed that students had installed a “hacked version” of firefox…

I probably can’t help you since I assume you are not from the same country as me. I would recommend that you use a more or less local service, but in order for us to give good recommendations, you will probably have to tell us where you are located.

Yeah that is indeed true unfortunately. I think small communities will be around eventually, it just takes time.

Yep, anytime anyone accesses anything on the internet, there are certain privacy concerns to be had. They are generally not an issue if you aren’t being reckless, but there is still always a risk.

If you are worried about anyone knowing your IP, the only way to avoid that is to not access the internet at all. The IP address is the address which is used to send you data, which is a necessity if you want to access anything. When you access a website for example, you are asking the web server to send you a webpage which you then see on your screen, otherwise you could not see it. In order for the server to send you that webpage, it needs your IP.

It’s as if you asked “If I order a package online, do they know my address?”. Well yes, they have to know your address, otherwise they cannot send you the package.

building trust with a host.

This is indeed one of the risks with lemmy and other federated, decentralized and self-hosted services. Those services are generally hosted by hobbyists, not by companies, which seemingly makes it a bit harder to evaluate if you can trust a given server or not.

But it’s worth it to keep in mind that even though companies generally have a lot more resources to take care of security, there are still a lot of examples where they simply don’t do that, for example to cut cost. You also have no idea who works as an admin at “socialmediacompany x”. For example, there are a lot of admins working at twitter or reddit who you have never heard about (and never will hear about) who probably have access to your data.

And companies often just sell your data, an issue that you probably don’t have to worry with lemmy anytime soon (hopefully).

The way I deal with that and why I don’t worry very much about lemmy is to take care about what information I share. I don’t care that a server admin could theoretically find out which country I’m from through my IP. I don’t post sensitive information and I don’t send sensitive direct messages. I use throw away e-mail addresses. I also don’t plan on reading illegal content. And I don’t feel attached to a specific server/lemmy instance, I don’t care if my account is lost.

Am I sharing my IP address/ location with my host instance?

Yes. If you connect to any server whatsoever, the server will have to know your IP, otherwise it can not send any data to you and the whole connection cannot be established. With your IP, one can figure out your (rough) location.

is there a log of my view history

As far as I can tell, yes. There is the option “show read posts” in your option menu which hides posts you have already read. In order for this to work, your read history has to be saved somewhere.

are there general privacy concerns that I am not thinking of?

There are always privacy concerns when accessing/using any service or server on the internet, at the end of the day it comes down to protecting yourself and using services you trust.

A potentially specific issue with federated, decentralized and self-hosted services such as lemmy is that the people who are running the servers are mostly hobbyists. Most will probably also work in IT professionally, but in general, people who host lemmy are doing it in their spare time at their own cost. This could potentially mean that they have less resources to secure their servers and the data on it than a multi-million dollar company.

Another thing to keep in mind on lemmy is that private/direct messages are not encrypted, which means that server admins can read your direct messages (there is a warning about this when you write a direct message).

I do not want to be in a position where a Government creates an instance, and allows them to monitor.

I’m not quite sure if I understand your worry here correctly. In general, most of the content that is posted on lemmy is publicly available anyway, so they wouldn’t even need an account to get that information, let alone their own instance.

And if governments have an issue with a user where they want information on a user, they can just contact the site admin and demand the information from them. So if you are planning on posting stuff that is considered illegal where you are from or if you are planning to access content that is considered illegal, Lemmy is probably a bad place to do that

I was only active on certain small subreddits, here I am active in more different communities.

Yes, I absolutely use adblock, I couldn’t imagine browsing without it. I support creators I like by donating them money or joining their patreon.

I don’t host a lemmy instance yet, but I host other services and I do it mainly for fun. As far as I have read, a small scale lemmy instance runs very well on very low performance hardware, which means the cost of running it is probably less than 10 $ a month.

The big lemmy instances that need better hardware have patreons and other services where people can donate money.