What you should not forget is that: public posts are public, private posts may still be public if sent to dishonest servers, DMs are not protected by encryption and rely on both involved instance's honesty.
If you allow everyone to follow you your data may get mined just as on the commercial platforms.
If you have a commercial bot (in disguise) in your followers, it will see and mine those toots.
Just being a federation is no silver bullet to the privacy issue. But ou aren't the product anymore.
Among the many good reasons to use mastodon for public discourse and something secure for those privacy things
It was suggested ages ago that Mastodon just be bundled with an xmpp server to handle DM and private multiuser chats in a combined interface. This is a solved problem; Mastodon is trying to reinvent the wheel.
@frankiesaxx @ckeen @RussSharek
after month of testing and running an und own matrix instance for me riot/matrix is the way to go for secure e2e encrypted 1:1 and group chat.
@kmj
And of course anyone is free to fork it and rework the privacy/DM handling. Let the best software win. (I suspect anything that handled DMs like private chat rooms would be a contender, that's the feature I miss most from Twitter.)
@RussSharek @ckeen
@frankiesaxx @ckeen @RussSharek actually i only have mastodon and riot as apps on my phone. riot on my desktop and notebook too. no other messenger or social app installed. i can live quit well having these two separated. as in commercial world, twitter/fb is ok for users
@frankiesaxx @ckeen @RussSharek
and finally i try to get https://kmj.at/tssop in start position
@kmj
I think having or not having the functionality users are trained to expect will affect adoption. I do use Mastodon less b/c for me Twitter is a nexus where ppl I know from a bunch of different places congregate and a lot of my use is in DM chats. I don't know what the solution is to that. Mastodon doesn't support it & it's hard enough to budge ppl off a platform w/o telling them now they need to join two to do what the one does.
@RussSharek @ckeen
How much of a headache was setting up matrix server?
@RussSharek @frankiesaxx @ckeen pretty straight forward. secure freebsd setup, matrix, letsencrypt... point your dns, optionally setup a turn server and you are done
@kmj @RussSharek @frankiesaxx Matrix is on my todo list but I currenty get by just fine with a xmpp server for my peers.
@ckeen @RussSharek @frankiesaxx was running xmpp in the past too, but always missed this multi device in sync part. never would move back
@kmj @RussSharek @frankiesaxx On the plus side the mac clients aren't outdated :)
@kmj @RussSharek @frankiesaxx Last time I have had a look (1.5 yrs ago) the server implementations looked like still being under heavy development. How's that now?
@ckeen @RussSharek @frankiesaxx server runs stable, client linux, ios, android too. i am windows free, but ppl told me stable too. mac works fine too
@kmj @RussSharek @frankiesaxx which one is it?
@ckeen @RussSharek @frankiesaxx standard matrix/synapse server, client riot.im
@kmj
That would also be a good solution. I think the main thing is people expect it to be in a single location/interface and that if you're interacting with someone on that platform one way, you can transition to another privacy level on the same platform. I want to be able to DM my fediverse homies in my fediverse application. But I don't really care what makes that happen on the back end.
@RussSharek @ckeen