- Mastodon is a federated and open version of twitter. You can use choose between multiple different competing public and private servers called instances. You can also run and use your own instance which is best practice from a trust perspective. Users can interact and 'follow' across instances.

- DMs are not encrypted so instance admins can read them.

- The bitcoinhackers instance is run by @nvk who we trust to keep it up, protect our privacy, and to not censor us.

@mattodell @nvk I mean, what specifically would he be protecting re: privacy? Other than DMs and some metadata like IP addresses, everything is public.