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.
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@kmj @RussSharek @frankiesaxx On the plus side the mac clients aren't outdated :)