@nightpool @cwebber Whether e-mail is used or not is more a question of legacy than that it would respect anyone's privacy.

My argumentation is primarily that an environment where the only difference between publishing your sensitive posts/pictures privately or publicly etc. is the value of some checkbox - then it's not appropriate for private communication. Even less so when that checkbox in practice is on a remote server governed by a remote admin.

E-mail clients, for comparison, don't have a "share this post" button that potentially goes worldwide. Public mailing lists are explicitly opt-in and there's no real notion of a "public e-mail inbox".

Federated social webs however don't work as they're dreamt about without eventually sharing information, metadata and posts to larger and larger - less controllable - groups of people.

Centralised systems can control this more - but once you go federated then the end station you will reach is full-on public socialising.