What You Should Know About Switching to Mastodon

Lauren Goode: And what about funding? But on Mastodon, you have any number of people who can control that depending on what instance you're on, so it's really you need to trust who your instance admins are, and that's a big reason why a lot of people are starting their own instances, because they don't want somebody else to be in control of their direct messages, things like that. Another thing I would say about … This isn't about decentralized networks in general, but one thing about Mastodon is that direct messages work a lot differently. So you don't want to go talking behind somebody's back and mention them in a DM, because they're going to get access to that DM, as an example. But just one thing to know about Mastodon is that DMs work a little bit differently, and they might surprise you how they work if you do it a little bit wrong.