The way I remember the order is that the parentheses around the link would make grammatical sense outside of markdown (the goal of markdown is to still be fully readable even when looking at the raw source).
For example if I were posting on a forum that didn’t have markdown support which one of these would make more sense:
You can find that on this lemmy instance (https://lemmy.world).You can find that on (this lemmy instance) https://lemmy.world.
Option 2 makes no sense grammatically. Then you just need to use the square brackets (which rarely show up in non-markdown text) to denote the link range.
Alternatively, if you still have a hard time remembering the order, you can use reference-style links which make it even more readable outside of markdown rendered contexts (note that there are no parentheses in this version, nothing to get confused):
[Here is a link][1] and [here is another link][2].
[1]: http://example.org
[2]: http://example.com
There’s no way of knowing, which is the whole problem with their model and why a lot of us self host things in the first place. Even if they super duper promise not to use the data, they could be lying. And if they are actually true to their word today, that could change tomorrow.