Does self hosting an instance of a federated service, like lemmy, effectively act as a VPN for your account?

This is, of course, assuming that the instance is not hosted on the same network that the device your account is using is accessing it from.

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I would say the answer is no, it does hide your IP, but it could leak other information.

If you are the only person using the instance, it can be used to discover which communities you have joined, and the domain name could be used to identify you.
- and messages are unencrypted. I think lemmy does not save the users ip. If they do they dont "broadcast" it at least.