> Is this worse than trusting Twitter, Facebook, or TikTok?
Yes for the first two, no for the third. US-based companies are large targets for potential lawsuits, and consequently have processes in place to prevent random employees from accessing your DMs without cause. I obviously wouldn't trust those companies completely -- we're really arguing about probabilities here -- but there's at least some measure of accountability that makes them unlikely to do something trivially stupid.
> there are no private messages on Mastodon
It does have a DM feature -- that they aren't private is exactly the point.
It's not about them being read, it's about them being used against me. Being scraped and weaponised to train some algorithm to exploit me. That's the issue I have.
Yes for the first two, no for the third. US-based companies are large targets for potential lawsuits, and consequently have processes in place to prevent random employees from accessing your DMs without cause. I obviously wouldn't trust those companies completely -- we're really arguing about probabilities here -- but there's at least some measure of accountability that makes them unlikely to do something trivially stupid.
> there are no private messages on Mastodon
It does have a DM feature -- that they aren't private is exactly the point.