Private account HOWTO

[pronoiac]

I wrote the below for a friend who might come to mefi.social.

Some things that come to mind:

• you can "Require follow requests" - Preferences, Profile, Appearance
• under Preferences, Other, you can:
  • set your posts default to "Followers Only"; you can change visibility post by post
  • Opt-out of search engine indexing for your profile page
  • Opt-out of an RSS feed for your public posts

I might come up with more, but feel free to ask questions, and let me know when you're up for seeing more peeps. I've been making a visibility of Unlisted "Greetings!" posts for new peeps, and, uh, it took me a while to realize lots of people can see those; it's not quite like the @/user mechanism on Twitter.

[pronoiac]

Perhaps I should write about "peeps who can see non-public messages".

• the admin of your instance
• admins of all your followers instances
• hosting operators [edit]

[pronoiac]

Going from searchtodon.social (RIP): add #nobot and #nosearch to the bio.

[pronoiac]

Also, via the Mastodon wiki:

Do not share dangerous and sensitive information over direct messages. Mastodon is not an encrypted messaging app like Signal or Wire, the database administrators of the sender’s and recipient’s servers have access to the text. Use them with the same caution as you would use forum PMs, Discord PMs and Twitter DMs.