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
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
