You access the Internet through a network owned by a corporation under the jurisdiction of a government, your ISP knows who you are and so your government knows who you are.

Both of our Lemmy instances are hosted by Hetzner, in Finland and Germany. Both instance's connections are proxied through Cloudflare, an American tech company.

Any one of these entities has the ability to track you to at least an ISP and potentially down to the nearest street intersection if you're using fiber/cable. And that ISP will have records linking your IP lease information to your identity, or at least the credit card/billing information that you provided.

The kind of people who would be putting you on a watchlist are not the kind of people who will be thrown off by simply changing usernames on social media.

Patience, probably.

Last I checked most of the instances had waiting lists and some sort of written answer application