Why YSK: It appears several Lemmy Instances are flagged as suspicious and at least 1 instance intentionally using the name of ransomware. A couple of the big enterprise monitoring suites (Fortiguard, ZScaler) will flag your account and may end up with you being pulled into an office for an explanation, or worse.
TL;DR: Keep browsing to your local instance at work for now.
If you use a vpn, I don’t think they can see your traffic
Depends. They might have a proxy in the network config or DNS or any number of non-network based methods of logging and tracking.