There's plenty of room to demand improvement. End-to-end encryption and tighter controls on (or elimination of) the use of "aggregate" personal info would be huge wins over the status quo. I even have faith that we can build privacy tech to be deployed widely and easily. Until then, only a few companies actually meet the bar, and they are the big ones everyone worries about.
Apparently some people I follow here are of two minds on how to model private user info security with hobbyist-run federated services vs. monolithic tech co's. There are only a few big co's I'd trust to defend user info from both external and internal attacks, but I'd trust them a lot more than anyone smaller, no matter how well intentioned. Tight fine-grained internal restricted access, logging, and auditing are hard problems requiring experience, public pressure, potential whistleblowers.
I rage-quit Twitter at the end of November in 2016. As someone who has worked in online communities for close to 20 years, I couldn’t stand being a member of a community where the people in charge cared so very little for their users. We worked very hard at Flickr to make sure that people were safe. Your company isn’t the government and you can delete any account at any time for any reason. If you create a community, it’s your jobs to ensure that it’s safe for all.
Pomplamoose, "Go Easy": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFzLk4LSfjA
Are you new to Mastodon?
Have you seen the awesome Content Warning feature??
If you're posting about sensitive topics, consider putting them behind a content warning. This puts your post body behind a "Show More" button. Some common CWs, off the top of my head:
• uspol (US Politics)
• mh (mental health)
• +, - (indicating a positive or negative take, often used with mh)
Allowing people to read certain topics at their own pace (or not at all) is one of Mastodon's greatest features.
Matt Haughey is the canary in my Twitter coal mine. https://a.wholelottanothing.org/2018/08/08/im-done-with-twitter/
Theater, video games, #pico, piano, comp sci, electronics, retro computing, Python. Wrote a book once, would do it again. he/him