There's this attitude that Mastodon does everything perfectly when it comes to combating racism, harassment, and other problems, which I find somewhat strange.
Mastodon does well, for example, in enabling server level blocks and defederation and the ability to import (hopefully curated) block lists from other users, although the latter functionality is not obvious to many people.
The number of severs, admins, and moderators also contributes to better human level attention of moderation issues.
But there are well known and longstanding issues such as the inability to truly lock down your account and retroactively privatize or control who sees your posts, which is the most effective way of shutting down a dog pile.
Of course, Mastodon likes to believe it prevents dog piles by its very nature, but if you have public facing posts, you're inevitably going to get some reply guys, trolls, and harassment. That's just the nature of social media.
Mastodon's decentralized nature can create problems of its own.
For example, private messages are not truly private or encrypted and last I checked, if you PM someone on another instance, the admin of that instance can see everything you say. As can your own admin, obviously.
If they choose to do so, of course, but admin flakiness and personal conflicts are not exactly uncommon on here, which is partly why people suggest running your own server. Which, ugh.
I tend to believe the advantages of discoverability and contextual conversations from text search and quote posts largely outweigh their potential downsides, especially with active moderation and better user tools.
And ultimately, there are no technical or software solutions for a site's underlying culture, such as Mastodon's sheer whiteness and insular, often hostile attitude toward Black people and more casual and non-tech-savvy users.
@gwynnion This point applies to just about any social media platform. Do you think Twitter/Instagram DMs are not visible to Twitter or Instagram owners? Or that messages you send in Facebook Messenger are invisible to Meta and it's advertising and data collecting machine? Have we so easily forgotten the entire Cambridge Analytica scandal and how large corporations use the data on the social platforms (including private messages) in order to target you with advertising or social campaigns?
It's great that you brought this up in discussion, this just shows the need for everyone to jump ship to a trully private, secure and end-to-end encrypted messenger solution.
There's #Signal which is really easy to set up and use. All you need is a phone number and you're done. #Telegram also encrypts your messages if you use the private chatrooms, and you can also set your phone number to be hidden, and use a user ID instead for searchability. Want even more security and descentralization as well? there is #Matrix and @joinjabber that allow you to pick any server and client of your choosing (Matrix encrypts all your messages by default, on XMPP there is a thing called OMEMO which is server and client (or app) dependent - more details here).
Or you can just create a #PGP key and encrypt the text you want to send on Mastodon like that.
I know it all sounds too complicated for the average folk, on one side, but on the other, if we do not understand technology, it's limitations and it's capabilities, we will never get to use it to full potential.
I put my XMPP address in my profile on this purpose - you can see it if you click on the 3 dots menu while in my profile, then "open original page".
And it's not just the Mastodon sysadmins that can read that database of PMs. Anyone that has physical access to it can read it, such as the ISP, any cops for any made up reason, etc.
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