#MASTODON POST PRIVACY - who can see your post?
PUBLIC π
Anyone can see and boost your post everywhere.
UNLISTED π
β
Tagged people
β
Followers
β
On your profile
β Local and federated timelines
β
Boostable
β
Visible to admins
FOLLOWERS ONLY π
β
Tagged people
β
Followers
β On your profile
β Local and federated timelines
β Boostable
β
Visible to admins
DIRECT MESSAGE βοΈ
β
Tagged people
β Followers
β On your profile
β Local and federated timelines
β Boostable
β
Visible to admins
@pettter Yes, and as of Mastodon 2.0.0 "followers-only" posts don't reach incompatible instances anyway - any instance that doesn't respect the "unboostable" quality of the post, including GNU Social etc. and older Mastodon instances.
@cassolotl That's helpful, thanks! What happens when one favorites sth, where does that show up in timelines ?
@ida Favourites don't show up in the timelines at all, but the person whose post you favourited gets notified in their notification column. :)
@cassolotl Yeah I thought so, too. Thanks for confirming!
@ida Cool, no worries! :)
@cassolotl Quick question, is a dm visible to admins on both sides? If greg@x.social dms steve@y.website, can the admins at both x and y see the dm?
@cassolotl we need otr
And your admin can see everything. I feel like that needs to be in this list for newbies to understand.
@RussSharek You've thrown me. I have mentioned that admins can see all messages regardless of privacy settings. Did you mean something else?
Wow, I totally missed that...which may indicate it needs to be more directly stated for new users.
@cassolotl wow so admins can see even direct messages? Which means nothing on here is completely private? Thatβs good to know.
@OscarMeyer Yes! I'm actually not aware of any social media site where this isn't the case. The admins need to be able to see reported messages so they can take action when someone breaches the code of conduct, right? Here and elsewhere.
@OscarMeyer Oh but yes, it is very important to know this, for sure. It's not expressly stated anywhere obvious before or after you sign up, which is weird because you need to know that stuff so that you can choose an admin you trust with that level of info, you know?
@cassolotl well sure, I guess there has to be a way for them to look it up, but the way it was worded it sounded like it would just pop up as part of their feed
@OscarMeyer Ohh I see what you mean!
I don't actually know what it's like when you're an admin. That part of the post is because in the first few versions of that particular post there was no "visible to admins" stuff, and I'd get people (a fair few) replying saying "but admins on all the instances can see your DMs!!"
So I kinda felt like I should add something. But next time I will make the wording clearer. Thank you. :)
@cassolotl good to see a clear table with direct and simple information. It seems people do not understand that that we are dealing with plain text boosted everywhere accross the internet and any info posted here MUST be assumed in public domain and that can be read by anyone. Specially admins who must manage the instance and could always just look into the database.
@cassolotl also, people don't seem to really thing about custom instances. If I wanted I could create an instance that seems to respect the protocol proposed levels, accept everything relayed to it and do whatever I wanted with the data, like republish everything as public anyway, or mine the data, sell everything after processing, etc. It actually seems great to consume data as an interested party. For private comunication look into xmpp+omemo, signal or keybase.
@vascorsd Yeah, that's true. I think if an admin did modify their instance to do anything shady or illegal like that it'd get instance-blocked by so many admins so fast! But that relies on us finding out. So, it's tricky and unreliable.
Same for twitter, facebook, google.
Except there is not one admin guy who has access to your "private messages" but more like a thousand... And i dont talk about the CDN server storing you naked pictures without any password :D
@tuxicoman @gme We put a lot of faith in these huge companies! :o (Well I do, maybe other more privacy-conscious people here do not.)
@cassolotl excellent! i'd just clarify that while admins could see a direct message, it's not something they'd encounter in normal usageβit's not like it appears in their timelines.
@alys Someone else mentioned that too, I think I'm going to try to make that clearer next time I repost!
@cassolotl "has the technical means to see X" vs. "sees X in normal usage" is a tricky distinction to make succinctly.
@alys True! It never even occurred to me that people would think that admins see DMs in their home timeline!
