Doc Edward Morbius ❌Q: How private is Mastodon / GNU Social?
A: Not very. Use email, XMPP, or other secure, encrypted protocols if you need privacy.
MMN-o ✅⃠@dredmorbius But at least you can use #tor against most instances afaik. !GNUsocial also works hard on avoiding third party servers, so no external javascript (also compatible without javascript at all) as well as locally stored media. Not even third party servers with a misleading domain name (i.e. Amazon S3 on a subdomain.service.example DNS).
Pseudonymity is king in a decentralised network and anonymous access to your pseudonym means mass-duplication publishing of possibly sensitive data. That's one security/privacy combination out of many.
!XMPP is good in other ways, for other security/privacy scenarios.
!XMPP is good in other ways, for other security/privacy scenarios.
Bob Mottram@mmn xmpp is one of the best systems for private communications in my opinion, even though the cool kids don't seem to like it. It can be routed through Tor. An xmpp server can run only from an onion address (you can do that with !Freedombone) and you can have encrypted group chat with OMEMO which has the OWS-type ratchet.