Hello everyone. I am still learning about the fediverse.
I wanted to create a Mastadon account, and I see many different options for servers. I couldn’t necessarily search which servers value privacy like this community does, so I am hoping you can inform me what servers DO offer that mindset.
And finally, do you just trust that they follow this, or is there a way to verify?
It seems like, from my understanding, my information will be stored by someone else, somewhere, in hopes it’s protected.
Use Mastodon or any decentralised platform responsibly is the way, in my opinion. If you can run your own instance, that will likely lead to better control over your data but does’t mean others servers won’t see it. that is the nature of these platforms by design.
Don’t put trust in anyone for it. When you make an account, go through the settings and adjust them based on what you are comfortable with. Use an alias name and email, of course. opt out of search engine appearances, or even social graph. Hide people you follow and that follow you. Adjust the settings of each post based on what it is as well.
End of the day, you will need to trust the person running the instance to do good enough management of the infrastructure. Use a server with active and transparent admin and it’s not too large to manage for them.
MastOdon (capitalized o for spelling visibility) is not end to end encrypted. Nothing you do there is private. Either you trust, or you don’t. So as the other commenter said, self host is the only way to ensure privacy on mastodon.
There was in fact a recent event where the FBI raided mastodon admin’s server and got their DMs, posts, and all private and public history of all users registered.
It is worth noting (assuming we are referring to the same incident) the Mastodon data wasn’t the target of the search, the person just happened to be actively working with a database backup when the FBI executed the warrant and took all of the person’s computers and stuff.
Use a throwaway email and use DMs knowing it’s not private
Your information will be stored on the server you choose.
It really doesn’t matter which one you choose, just choose one. It doesn’t matter which one.
The difference is Mastodon will not store anymore information than you explicitly give it. It’s not going to mine your location data, it’s not going to ask for your contacts to add to a database and profile people. It’s not going to track your activity across the web and use your activity to serve you ads. There are no ads, so there is no incentive.
Even if your Mastodon server host WANTED to track all of your information like Meta or other centralized services do, they couldn’t afford to.
The way to ensure privacy is running your own instance. It’s rather simple with services like masto.host and some VPS providers might have one click solutions. Otherwise, you have to trust an admin of an instance, especially with the Meta stuff.
I am on a Pleroma server called Free Speech Extremist myself. Very light on rules:
https://freespeechextremist.com/
If you are wanting to stick with Mastodon over Pleroma then I would suggest Linux Rocks:
