Another friendly reminder:
Mastodon is awesome, but mastodon isn't an appropriate tool if you want private communications. DMs aren't actually private, they can be seen by instance admins and maybe by other people, it isn't at all secure.
Mastodon and GNU social aren't made for private conversations, if you want to have a private conversation there are many tools that are appropriate for that.
I suggest Tox, but Cryptocat and XMPP with OTR are also good. There are others but I have used those
@inmysocks XMPP with OMEMO is probably your best choice if you want a fully open and federated system right now. Matrix is up and coming, but e2e is still in beta. Signal is good if you don't care about Federation or multi-device and you want to give your phone number to everyone you talk to.
And pretty much everything leaks metadata, at least of the kind "you talked to your server at this time, and your server talked to this other server at this time". Maybe tox doesn't?
@jfm yeah, that is actually the big selling point of Tox for me, it has some very interesting technological solutions for the initial connections and then after that only your ISP has a way to listen and there are things that are in place to make that hard too.
@inmysocks I will have to read up on it.
@inmysocks Finally looked into tox. I don't like what I see, but my opinions have low epistemic value.
@jfm is there something specific you dislike about it?
@inmysocks OK.
1. Manually exchanging public keys on order to contact people.
2. Pure p2p, which I don't like on mobile devices. Also implies no multi-device support, which is important to me.
3. Development community doesn't inspire the trust (subjective).
@inmysocks As to 1, 56A1ADE4B65B86BCD51CC73E2CD4E542179F47959FE3E0E21B4B0ACDADE51855D34D34D37CB5 is a much less wieldy id than myname@xmppserver.org or @username:matrixserver.org.
For 2, yeah, I guess we want different things. I want to be able to continue the same conversations on my phone, tablet, and desktop. This works great on XMPP with OMEMO, okay on matrix (will be great someday), poorly on Signal, and not at all on tox.
3 is just an impression from HN threads.
@jfm Fair enough. I am not personally involved with the development, I was just interested in what people like or don't like. My thoughts quick thoughts: 1 - this isn't really different than your id on other platforms is it? 2 - This is actually one of the biggest draws for me, I guess we want different things. 3 - I will have to look closer at this, I haven't looked at the dev community much.