Mastodon Thought/Concern

With the recent news about the purchase of Twitter by Musk, I've been seeing a lot of news and recommendations about Mastodon. I have a Mastodon account that I really don't use other than checking it every six months for a few minutes. But I want to share a thought that I saw on Tumblr the other day:

toskarin
every time tumblr or twitter is shit, recommendations for mastodon instances start going around. my criticism of mastodon hasn’t changed for years now, and it’s a variation on “imagine if tumblr drama could result in a website being deleted and your worst ex getting access to every dm you’ve ever sent”
toskarin
did you know that mastodon admins can read your dms as long as either you or the recepient are on an instance they host, because they’re not encrypted
proponents argue it’s not a problem when it’s actually extremely a problem considering that mastodon (by design) encourages small friend groups to run instances together and have personal relationships with admins like it’s just not fit for purpose
alasse-irena
There are a few people in the notes saying things like “but isn’t this true for discord and Tumblr as well?” Which like, yes, it is - your DMs aren’t end-to-end encrypted, and there are staff at Tumblr and discord who have access to all DMs. So like, probably don’t plan an insurrection over either of these platforms. Use signal or telegram or even Facebook secure messaging instead.
However, that’s not really the crux of what op is pointing out. We’re all using discord. We’ve all decided we’re kind of okay with a few strangers involved in administrating the platform having access to our DMs.
However, the way that Mastodon works, it’s not a distant stranger who might access your DM. Think of it like every discord server being a different platform with different moderation rules and its own administration team. So it’s less like a stranger who works for a company can read your DMs and more like your friend who runs the server can read your DMs.
Which although it’s not worse in terms of security, is a big liability when it comes to interpersonal drama in your social group.

I saw another post (that I cannot currently find) point out that larger corporations also usually have internal rules in place to discourage or prevent random employees from reading your personal messages.

I like the idea of Mastodon. I think it's really great that people can make and run their own social media networks. But I think that the difference between the very personal ownership of a Mastodon instance and the cold distance of Twitter's ownership needs to be recognized. The original post can be found on alasse-irena's blog.