As I said here, both the admin of the sending and receiving instances are able to view direct messages. If DMs are encrypted that’s no longer a concern, which is why in my comment starting this thread I said this news was good.

Direct messages aren’t intended to be public

Do you have a source you could share about admins only seeing the private messages of local users? That’s not my understanding.

Take a look at this post or this one . They say that the admins of both the sending and receiving instance could decide to read your direct messages.

Privacy isn’t just for illegal acts. (And plenty of laws are unjust) You’re right that for truly sensitive communication it’s better to choose a tool dedicated for that purpose. It can still be beneficial to add encrypted communication to direct messages.

Here’s one post about it. I’m not one for direct messaging on social media personally. And on centralized services it’s true that your direct messages can be seen by employees if they’re sufficiently motivated or by court order, hacks, that sort of thing. But on mastodon both the administrator of your instance and the admins of the instances of the people you’re messaging can see your direct messages. Since an instance can be set up quickly by just one person, there’s higher likelihood of access. That person may have no qualms about accessing private info, they may have insufficient resources for proper security, or to fight legal efforts to access information. A large company will in theory have more concern about reputational risk if it’s uncovered they’ve accessed private information than some individuals will. I know many people running instances take great pride and care in what they do, but that’s not always true.

This is great. I think one critique of the fediverse is the lack of privacy, so it’s a welcome development.

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I’ll get complaints from people they can’t add/remove members from a group chat, and it’s because I’m in the chat, and use Google voice.