I recently learned that voting on lemmy is not anonymous. Anyone can get information about who has upvoted and downvoted a post or comment.
In combination with your IP, this is a massive privacy (maybe even physical security) risk. Also, people can target you for your votes.
Sadly, this is something where I would prefer Reddit over Lemmy. Big tech scrapes data from both places anyways, at least Reddit is safe.
IP thing is a risk but I don’t see an alternative as you pointed out.
Only your instance can see ips. They’re a fundamental part of how the internet works, so there’s no alternative to that.
Other instance admins can’t see your ip.