so, i think "yeah well $company employees can read your DMs too" is a shallow retort

because like, how many twitter employees do you know? how many gmail engineers hang out in your community?

in contrast, if your instance isn't too big, your local admins are probably invested in your community. they probably have seen you around at the very least. they might be friends with half your polycule

what i'm saying is, they have more of an incentive to snoop, if they're so inclined

which is not to say that "mastodon unilaterally bad because dms, im going back to twitter" is a good take

but idk especially in our frequently abused communities, i think distrust is valid, and i think that retort is not

on the other hand i also think "actualy i work in the industry and there's no way anyone at $company could just have access to the database and read your messages" is not convincing

like yes i believe that in many places stuff is set up correctly so that most people dont have access and the ones that do leave an audit trail. emphasis on believe. i can't see that. i don't know whos reading the audit trail and whether it'd be in their interest to keep quiet.

maybe at twitter they need to reunite the ten pieces of the ancient birdsong key to read a single row from the production database

but like, i don't know that? no company is transparent about this shit except maybe some vpn providers