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Did you know that Mastodon Admins have the power to hide your posts to any user that's not logged in?

They would have to enable "Hide public timeline from logged out users".

Furthermore, enabling "Authorized Fetch" makes it so that users that are logged into an instance that is blocked, cannot see or interact with your posts.

If these things are important to you, you should discuss them with your admin or consider migrating to an instance that has these features enabled.

Otherwise, every post you have set to "public" can be read by anyone via the website.

Also, Mastodon has a built in RSS feed for every profile that cannot be disabled without editing the code. This would allow anyone to follow you, even without an account, and you would have no idea about it.

#Mastodon #Fediverse #Fedi

4 comments

fell

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@BeAware@social.beaware.live

> every post you have set to "public" can be read by anyone via the website

No worries, I thought that's the whole point 😅

BeAware

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@fell@ma.fellr.net same! But some have a misunderstanding that there's some sort of "privacy" here by default. Not sure where that came from, but it's worrisome.

agorakit

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@BeAware@social.beaware.live @fell@ma.fellr.net also scrapable by ai ... Well... One cannot have something public without the annoyance that goes with it. Seems an option to have stuff less public would be nice

BeAware

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@agorakit @fell there ARE those options.

For admins, the previously mentioned options are the way to do it for the entire instance.

For users, you can set your profile to approve follows, that way you know exactly who's following you. Then, you can set your posts to "followers only" so that they won't appear on the web or RSS at all. Then there's the option to hide your posts from search indexing as well.