This. But more importantly, you trust their judgement when it comes to moderation and defederation. While you don't understand these issues, you can either rel

This. But more importantly, you trust their judgement when it comes to moderation and defederation. While you don't understand these issues, you can either rely on somebody else's advice for that, or join a server at random and see what happens. Unless you've joined the new Gab, you should be okay – if anything goes wrong you can just migrate to another server. As for the things you've mentioned: you shouldn't assume your communication is private anywhere on Mastodon (there's some encryption proposals, but that's a long road from now), and you definitely should use different passwords for different websites.