Thank you for actually writing out what happened. I still can’t make sense of Mastodon threads. Whoever had the idea to make you click “read more” on each individual post to read it needs to take a basic UX course. Absolutely unusable.
The funniest part about all this is that so many people apparently joined the Fediverse thinking it was some rock-solid fortress of privacy when it’s the exact opposite by design. I’ve seen multiple posts over the last week where people seem absolutely freaked out that Meta is going to be getting their data, meanwhile anyone with a basic knowledge of Docker and networking can spin up an instance, federate with everything, and get a steady stream of that data 24/7 to use however they want.
If you need privacy, use E2E encrypted chat.
https://docs.beehaw.org/docs/important-questions-decisions-and-reflections/beehaw-lemmy-and-a-vision-of-the-fediverse/
Not the person you replied to BTW.