Oh no, not even. Here's the gist, Mastodon is "bad" because:

• Admins can read DMs
• Instances can block each other
• Instances can close

The main driver behind all three arguments was that you have to trust your instance admin which was seen as a bad thing because of pesky interpersonal relationships and people moving on.

@Hypolite Petovan On the fringe, I can understand how trusting your data to a faceless corporation might feel more confortable than having to think about this handful of singular beings who might have access to it. But c'mon.

Uh, man .. srsly? There are _SO_ many examples where data stored by some company got leaked or was outright misused by individuals or even teams...

Mh .. no but i actually have to call this belief/this gut feeling a techno primitive superstition.....

And sadly there are still a lot of those out there. mh ;)

It’s more about comparing a diffuse risk with a really personal risk. Sure, your data is misused by giant corporations, but you don’t know the people who exploited your data and you never will, which makes this risk almost abstract. You know it happens, but it rarely has any direct consequences for you, or you might not be able to link them with the corporation.

On the opposite side, there’s a smaller risk of a Mastodon admin reading your DMs, but it carries a risk of direct and personal consequences that may feel outsized because of how easy it is to imagine these consequences and link them to the admin.

@Hypolite Petovan Yeah, as i said, there is a huge disparity in the "feel" and "reality" parts of these problems. ;)

One should not assume any communication as safe at all, as long as one has seen to make it safer (by encrypting it)..

Btw .. uhm, how can the consequence of a private admin reading my private messages be greater than when a anonymous dude in a company reads it?

Disclaimer btw: I'm commenting from the perspective of being a BBS Sysop myself way back in the 90ies already - where things were different but exactly the same way as they are nowadays. ;)

One likely scenario: you aren't publicly out and you share your gender/sexuality privately, admin reads it and exposes you.

Another possible scenario: you criticize admin in DMs, they read it and decide to terminate your account on their instance.

@Hypolite Petovan @Jonathan Lamothe (he/him) Point 1) is true, but so for Twitter/Facebook and any other software that does not encrypt messages client-side. So in other words: If you write sensitive DMs, use client-side encryption and you don't have to trust your administrator. 2) Yes, including normal users, e.g. both on Friendica and Mastodon is known to me. You do this, when you feel to much annoyed of any accounts over there. 3) Yes, the administrator might want to move on and/or cannot effort to maintain his growing and growing instance like it happens now with mastodon.social . It is part of the dynamic that privately run instances suffer from. Still also commercial services can close, e.g. when the company behind it doesn't generate to much income to keep the servers running and maintaining the website (fixing bugs, adding new features, ...).

So these reasons are not only valid to the Fediverse, but of cause valid if any commercial social network.

@Ingo Jürgensmann Does that mean Nerdica is going to be faster? That would be nice. It's by no means painfully slow, but it's not exactly fast either.

I joined Nerdica recently hoping to interact with even more nerds, but so far all the nerds I'm following are still on Diaspora.