so this part isn't entirely true

"once a toot is federated it is on the remote instances forever;"

it seemed true for direct toots i sent to my other account, which never deleted remotely. but i just successfully deleted a public toot and it disappeared on the other acct.

someone just confirmed my observation that remote direct toots don't seem to disappear when deleted

so
public delete
direct don't?

just now sent unlisted and private test toots:
- unlisted was only visible remotely if i directly viewed my timeline in 4th column. did NOT show up in my follower tootstream. had expected it to.
- private was not visible on remote instance, as expected

@alyx This is very confusing ...

@Jules correct!

lmk if you have specific questions.

@alyx thanks!

So it is not possible to get toots out to all my followers privately, if they are not all on one instance.

So really... the advertised privacy heaven is only working on local instance.

@Jules that is my impression, yea.

to be fair i'm not sure mastodon has promoted itself as a privacy heaven; if anything it seems less private than a locked-down twitter account due to your toots being stored on all federated servers. admins could conceivably peek at them in their database even though they were not themselves in the intended privacy group.

@alyx Yes, I'm aware of this risk of decentralized systems in general.

"privacy heaven" was bit of an exaggeration on my side.

I guess it's a good thing to be able to toot just to the local instance. "Toot to followers only" is just the wrong description for this option.

@Jules actually, tooting just to the local instance (including ppl who are not following you) is something being asked for right now:

https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/861