Private and Public Mastodon

Anything I publish on any social network I'd be also comfortable seeing posted on every wall in foot-tall letters, with my real name attached to it. Were I not be comfortable with that, I won't post it.

I consider all "private" or "limited" posting provisions on all social networks as paper walls at best, one small devops or SWE mistake from being torn and becoming visible to public. Maybe I'm overshooting a bit, but my past experience shows that it's not much of an exaggeration. So I never use any "private" features and post everything I ever post as openly as possible.

Social media is a colander. Expect anything and everything to leak. Embrace being public.

If you want something with more real privacy, as in not likely to leak if all parties involved take reasonable care, use something that was built with privacy in mind, like, IDK, Signal, or maybe a private Telegram chat, or a private Mastodon instance only accessible through a VPN which you personally and competently operate. Of course it's unlikely to hide you from state-level actors, but at least it's more likely to protect you from simple operator blunders.

Bad actors have ignored them from the start, and are good enough at faking headers/using multiple ips such that they are very difficult to block

Email is also full of disgusting stuff but nobody is going to abandon email because it's "full of child porn", although we all know perfectly well that there's lots of that stuff being emailed around.

Well-run Masto instances are actually pretty safe and pleasant spaces these days.

If Mastodon gets content licensing right, you'll still be able to ignore it and go ahead and crawl data when the license forbids, it scratches your itch and you're ethically challenged. But then if you do anything with that data in public you're going to get legal nastygrams. That may not even stop you, but it will drive up the cost of your lack of ethics.

Ask any security pro. You can't ever stop all the attackers. All you can do is make it more and more expensive to do bad stuff, and eventually most of them won't have a strong enough incentive to pay the price.

There are plenty of people on Mastodon - the vast majority is my bet - who, when there's a choice of content licenses, will cheerfully say "make it public", and then there will be excellent full-text search.