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by brenns10 483 days ago
What weird fake information you're posting. Yes, administrators of fediverse servers can read your personal correspondence -- same as Facebook, X, and other social media sites that don't offer federation (unless you opt into some limited e2ee option). But I, as a fediverse admin, have no ability to read (private) correspondence between two others who don't use my instance.

Ultimately it comes down to: you must trust your instance admin. (Just like you must trust Facebook and X and Tiktok and whomever else). As a result, maybe take private conversations somewhere safer, like Signal or a pgp conversation. If you don't trust your instance admin, why did you sign up with your instance?
1 comments
fasbiner 483 days ago
>If you don't trust your instance admin, why did you sign up with your instance?

Probably because you told them it was a cool OSS twitter alternative and not something that takes all of social media's moderation and privacy and content problems and multiplies them by the number of instances you join without any of the legal protections associated with being able to file civil or criminal complaints against an identifiable entity answerable to the laws of your country.

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brenns10 482 days ago
Haha it definitely takes the content moderation problems and distributes then across all the instances. But that's kind of the whole point. You can join an instance that moderates content in accordance to your preferences, rather than dealing with the weird policies of Meta/X. I'm sorry you don't like it though.
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fasbiner 481 days ago
It seems like we agree: the whole point of Mastadon is to do something that nearly all users don't want and actively fear - being forced to trust both the intentions and the opsec of anonymous individuals who are effectively beyond the law, and being blamed for trusting them if anything goes wrong ever.

Do you comply with the CCPA or GDPR, or are the users on your instance empowered by being given the "choice" to give you unlimited access, use, and retention of their data without their informed consent, even when it violates civil and criminal law?

If you think data privacy laws are wrong and intend to violate them, you should say so in a way that makes informed consent possible. If you're comfortable with rationalizing violating informed consent in some ways, it kind of implies the "content in accordance with your preferences" may similarly contain content of non-consensual acts that are also illegal.

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