I’m learning about FOSS and internet anonymity, and am wondering if it is necessary for somebody to use a different email address for every different discourse account, if they do not want various accounts to be linked? For example, is there a central database which discourse staff, a hacker, or AI can tie various accounts to each other, based on email addresses and/or IP address logs? Or alternatively, are different discourse forums like decentralized “instances” whose do not have a relation with a central discourse hub, except for using the same software and URL/domain? I read that: The server side of Discourse is Ruby on Rails backed by a Postgres database and Redis cache. You can deploy our standard Discourse Docker container on any virtualized cloud server (Digital Ocean, Amazon EC2, Rackspace, Azure) with 1 GB RAM. I don’t know if this means all discourse forums are on the aforementioned server, of it they are just as likely to be self-deployed on a different server? And even if they are on the same server, does the fact that discourse is open-source mean anyone can access the account info across discourse forums?

might be worth mentioning that within a single Discourse forum, the forum admin can see the IP addresses for all users, and if there are multiple accounts with the same IP address, this is visible to the admin. So if you have multiple accounts on a single Discourse then its possible to see this.

Can different discourse accounts be linked if they share login email and/or IP address?

Product Support

pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman) August 21, 2024, 11:23am 2

No. Each discourse site is its own database, owned by whoever runs it.

Even those hosted by a single service have completely separate databases that are not connected in any way.

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Can different discourse accounts be linked if they share login email and/or IP address?

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