Hello everyone. I am still learning about the fediverse.
I wanted to create a Mastadon account, and I see many different options for servers. I couldn’t necessarily search which servers value privacy like this community does, so I am hoping you can inform me what servers DO offer that mindset.
And finally, do you just trust that they follow this, or is there a way to verify?
It seems like, from my understanding, my information will be stored by someone else, somewhere, in hopes it’s protected.
MastOdon (capitalized o for spelling visibility) is not end to end encrypted. Nothing you do there is private. Either you trust, or you don’t. So as the other commenter said, self host is the only way to ensure privacy on mastodon.
There was in fact a recent event where the FBI raided mastodon admin’s server and got their DMs, posts, and all private and public history of all users registered.
It is worth noting (assuming we are referring to the same incident) the Mastodon data wasn’t the target of the search, the person just happened to be actively working with a database backup when the FBI executed the warrant and took all of the person’s computers and stuff.