to build on that, a mastodon instance's "federated" feed is the feed of stuff that everyone on the server is receiving. Having publicly readable posts is core

to build on that, a mastodon instance's "federated" feed is the feed of stuff that everyone on the server is receiving. Having publicly readable posts is core to the whole idea, just like Twitter. Note: there are some interesting forks like Hometown[1] that have interesting privacy variants. The big feature I'm envious of in Hometown is the ability to send a message _just_ to people on your server that will never leave it. BUT overall mastodon is 100% about publicly readable information (like Twitter). If someone isn't comfortable with that they shouldn't use Mastodon. [1]: https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown