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?