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Safety and privacy settings

Warning

Mastodon/Hometown is designed to be public social media, not secure messaging. Most of the privacy/blocking features only work with platforms that respect the same rules, and there are Fediverse platforms, clients, and tools that have been explicitly designed to get around these rules. Flipping.rocks does block scraping apps when possible, but we can't catch everything. Assume people or servers you block can still see your posts if they really want to.

Your account can be as public or locked-down as you like. Please look through the settings thoroughly. Here are some things you may want to adjust.

Public profile → Privacy and reach

Options at flipping.rocks/settings/privacy:

Reach

  • Feature profile and posts in discovery algorithms: These features aren't used on flipping.rocks, but other Fediverse servers may recommend accounts to follow or highlight popular posts from other servers. If you don't want your profile or posts to be featured, uncheck this box.
  • Automatically accept new followers: If you want to approve followers, uncheck this box.
    Note: If you do check this box, you will still need to approve follow requests from people on servers silenced by you or by flipping.rocks.
  • Opt out of an RSS feed for your public posts: Hometown/Mastodon automatically generates an RSS feed of your public posts. People can use various apps to subscribe to this feed to see your new posts, even if they are not on the fediverse. It is just like subscribing to a podcast. (In fact, it is exactly like subscribing to a podcast—a podcast is just an RSS feed with audio files in it.) If you don't want this enabled, uncheck this box.
  • Include public posts in search results: Mastodon now allows searching the full text of public posts, not just hashtags. You can opt out of this by unchecking the box.
  • Include profile page in search engines: What it says on the tin. Note that not all search engines may respect this preference.

Privacy

  • Show follows and followers on profile: If you don't want people to see who you follow and who follows you, uncheck this box.
  • Display from what app you sent a post: Which apps you use can reveal personal information about you—for example, if your phone is iOS or Android. If you have multiple accounts and use a less common app, someone may be able to figure out the accounts belong to the same person. For most people, this is not a big deal, but if you really need to hide your Internet tracks, uncheck this box.

Other preferences

  • Posting defaults (flipping.rocks/settings/preferences/posting_defaults): You can set default post visibility, quoteability, and federation status here. (You can still change it per post.)

    "Quoting" a post means boosting it with your own comment attached above it. On one hand, this gives people more ways to discuss and engage with your posts. On the other, it can be used for low-effort drive-by dunks. Use your own discretion.

    If you uncheck "Allow my posts to reach other servers by default", only other flipping.rocks users will be able to see your posts. You probably want to keep this box checked.

  • Other preferences (flipping.rocks/settings/preferences/other): You can opt out of search engine indexing here. Note that 1) this only applies to your posts on flipping.rocks, not copies visible on other servers; and 2) some search engines, scrapers, etc., do not respect this opt-out.

  • Automated post deletion (flipping.rocks/statuses_cleanup): You can have old posts automatically deleted. You can choose when posts are deleted, anywhere from 1 week to 2 years after posting. You can also choose certain categories of posts to not automatically delete, like direct messages, posts with media, and posts with a specified number of favourites or boosts.

  • Account settings (https://flipping.rocks/auth/edit): You can see what devices you are logged in on, and log out of those sessions manually.

  • Two-factor authentication (flipping.rocks/settings/otp_authentication): You can require entering a code from an authenticator app to log in to your account.

  • Authorized apps (flipping.rocks/oauth/authorized_applications): You can see phone, web, or computer apps that have access to your account. If you haven't used an app for a long time, it's a good idea to revoke its access.