Hey! I missed an email from my SMTP provider and they revoked my account :( sent them the requested information verifying that I am infact human and pending them verifying me.

>I think the people running the servers have a lot of access and power, it's been mentioned as a possible issue

Yes Mastodon DM's are basically posts with viewers restricted to the sender and recipient. It is in their roadmap to add E2E encryption, but not there yet. More info here: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/11/mastodon-private-and-secure-lets-take-look

It's not really the type of platform as reddit, more akin to Twitter Mastodon instances are federated so you can follow people on other instances and they'll show up in your feed even though they're not members of your particular server