Dear #TwitterMigration folks, an important tip on #privacy on the fediverse:

There is none.

This is a public medium; please treat it as such. Just as you have no privacy on Twitter (Elon Musk can read all your DMs), you have no privacy on the instance you’re on (your administrators can read all your posts).

You can set the visibility of a post but that’s a viewing suggestion, not a privacy guarantee.

Think of your posts as postcards, not sealed letters, and you should be fine.

#fediTips

Even if you run your own instance, like I do, you have no #privacy on the #fediverse.

Only I get to read the direct messages received at my instance but I have no control over who sees the direct messages I send to other instances.

So, again, until end-to-end encryption is mandated by the core protocol (ActivityPub), remember:

Treat all posts on #mastodon / the fediverse as public and use an end-to-end encrypted messaging app like Signal if you want to have private conversations with people.

@aral Other messenging alternatives with end to end encryption are Matrix and XMPP. Those two are even decentralized like the fediverse.

@LunaDragofelis @aral Must we always have this conversation? XMPP and Matrix will unfortunately never reach mainstream. And this post is quite clearly aimed at the mainstream. Signal has the best chance to succeed in this space, by a wide margin too.

@dusnm

"XMPP and Matrix will unfortunately never reach mainstream"

Define "mainstream",

@LunaDragofelis @aral

@selea @dusnm @LunaDragofelis @aral I kinda hate how we measure a technology's success by "mainstream" or how many people uses it. It doesn't say anything about how useful a technology is itself.

@selea @LunaDragofelis @aral @dusnm Virtually nothing would change if the entire world used XMPP versus if no one used it. It would still remain the same, just as with ActivityPub arguably.

@oklomsy @aral @LunaDragofelis @selea If a tree falls in a forest and nobody’s around to observe it, did it fall at all? You can have the most useful technology on the planet, but if nobody’s using it that itself renders it useless. We don’t need alternatives, we need the alternative, singular. Too much choice is paralyzing. Focus on Signal, because it’s familiar to what people already use.

@dusnm @aral @LunaDragofelis @selea I wish we had a universal standard but that's why technology is awesome! Lot's of different ways to do different things. No one is perfectly satisfied with a universal standard and there will always be someone who will complain.

It's why we have XMPP, Matrix and IRC. It's why we have ActivityPub, Pump.io and OStatus. It's why we have mp3, ogg and flac.

Not a single one is perfect on its own.

@oklomsy @dusnm @aral @LunaDragofelis @selea https://xkcd.org/927

This forever