Lemmy the software does not come with any propaganda. Some Lemmy instances or communities may be moderated in a specific way or endorse specific political views, but that's up to each instance to decide for themselves.
Passwords are hashed, it's not possible for any instance owner to inspect those.
As for e-mails, it's not technically possible to hide those from instance owners, because servers need to be able to read the e-mail addresses in order to actually send e-mails. So you should assume that your e-mail address is always visible to whoever runs the instance you're on - but this is true for any website you sign up on with your e-mail.
For all system logs, log retention is currently configured to be 14 days. Any logs older than that are automatically deleted. I don't have any plans to change this at the moment.
do you only keep the minimum data necessary to run the service
Yes! I am not collecting any data other than what the Lemmy software collects on its own. I am not planning on setting up any frontend analytics or telemetry on top of the Lemmy UI.
Thanks for the thought! I am funding everything myself for now. If the load goes up significantly, then I might consider setting up some optional community funding thing for infrastructure costs, but for now the costs are totally manageable.
I believe that the first time somebody subscribes to a community from another instance, there might be a delay in syncing things up for that community. But later on, everything should be quite fast (I've already have some near real time comment discussions with people from other instances).
Yep, it's totally possible to have a federated instance with closed sign-ups.
In terms of how difficult it is to manage - I would say it depends on your experience and how exactly you want to set things up. If you don't already have experience with setting up and monitoring servers in production then it might take you a while to figure things out.
For me personally, the quality of content drops off very quickly after page 1 (for example on my personal home feed), but with infinite scroll, I found myself very often just wading through the low quality stuff on autopilot without even realizing what I was doing. It's just a problem that I don't even have to think about when I don't have infinite scroll.
sunaurus @ sunaurus @lemm.ee Posts 49Comments 331Joined 2 yr. ago 
Lemmy the software does not come with any propaganda. Some Lemmy instances or communities may be moderated in a specific way or endorse specific political views, but that's up to each instance to decide for themselves.