It's complicated. You can lock down privacy in FB pretty well, but you'd basically have to make your profile completely private, and that's really not the point of a social network, I suppose. The FB groups are tricky. Public groups can be seen by anyone and all the members can be seen. Private groups can be seen, but the posts and members are private until a person joins that group.
If you want to create another account on Instagram and you don't want people to know it is another account that you own, you need to be sort of stealthy about it. If you use the Instagram app to create a new account but it is associated with your main account, it will pop up in the "recommended to follow" lists of people who follow your main account. The best way to do this would be a totally different e-mail address to create a totally separate Instagram account that you do not link in any way to your original account. You also might want to give it an unrelated name that people wouldn't associate with you, and then you could make it private so people couldn't see any of your posts. You can then follow people in the VSG community and post things yourself, but of course, you'd have to allow people to follow your private account for anyone to see it. If your intent is to just follow people, then that isn't a big deal.
Other forums like this one are usually more private since most people aren't looking at a bariatric forum unless they are part of the community.
I thought that I was going to keep this a secret, but I changed my mind. I'm not worried about it anymore, which is pretty liberating. People will either be understanding and supportive, or they will be ignorant. So far I haven't come across anyone who hasn't been excited and supportive of my goals from surgery. I deactivated my FB account for now, so I haven't posted about it there, but I do have a second Instagram account and a YouTube channel that I'm documenting my journey on.
