meta, mastodon, dms
I'll explain how Mastodon DMs work, and what that means for you. Mastodon doesn't have DMs like Twitter does, just posts which have their privacy settings set to Direct/mentioned people only. DMs aren't encrypted in any way. There isn't any way through the Mastodon UI that an admin can view your DMs, but they can look in the database if they really wanted to. If you send a DM to a user on another instance, that admin could also, potentially, do the same. That touches on...
meta, mastodon, dms
...one of the big things when choosing a Mastodon instance. You need to trust that the admin won't abuse that feature, and if sending to a person on another instance that their admin won't either.
Will I look through your DMs? No. But you shouldn't need to trust what I say. E2EE should come to Mastodon eventually. Until then, use Signal, Wire, WhatsApp, or any other messaging platform with E2EE if you need to send anything potentially sensitive.
meta, mastodon, dms
@nathan One point I'd add: It's not even necessarily about trusting the admin, but also whether or not you can trust their knowledge of best practices around security, and ability to resist coersion (by state actors or otherwise).
Thanks for the info, I've been wondering how it handles the DB and hadn't had a chance to investigate yet.
meta, mastodon, dms
@nathan Note that Twitter DMs aren't encrypted either. So don't share anything over DMs on either Mastodon or Twitter that you really don't want their admins (or law enforcement) to be able to access (even if you trust them now). Use end-to-end encrypted messengers like Signal, Matrix/Element, Wire, etc.