We tried to run a social media site and it was awful
stopthatgirl7@kbin.social to 
Fediverse@kbin.social – 0 points – ft.com
Extinction looms for FTAV’s Mastodon presence
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stopthatgirl7@kbin.social to Fediverse@kbin.social – 0 points –
Mastodon administrators have access to everyone's private messages? Wtf? Is lemmy like that?
Anyone who owns a server can access all the data stored on it, unless the data is end-to-end encrypted. Whether it's mastodon, Lemmy, Facebook, twitter, Gmail, vBulletin, whatever.
If you need to say something that you can't risk anyone else seeing, use an end-to-end encrypted messaging app, or implement encryption yourself using e.g. PGP.
I mean I don't care I'm not saying anything illegal anyway, and I assumed reddit administration could read messages, I'm just surprised. I assumed because of how lemmy started and the whole idea of taking away drastic overreach by admins that private messages would be set up to be... private.
The admins to perform upgrades, monitoring, fixes, etc.. will require root access to the database. That means they can alter all your posts to say *blah blah blah" if they wanted.
Similarly passwords will be encrypted within the database and encryption algorithms have to be able to go in both directions. Normally they need a seed value to start random generation. The admin defines the seed as a result an admin can decrypt everything in the database.