If your profile and posts are set to "public" and you can read this very post, you should have no sense of "privacy" here on Fedi. That means ANYONE can reply.
There's 20,000+ instances and new ones every day, there's NO WAY to tell who is accessing your posts or what they're doing with them.
Fediverse is not some kinda "bastion for privacy" nor is there any sort of "consent" required to see your posts if they are public.
The only way you can be 100% sure that your followers are the only ones that directly see your posts is to make your profile and posts private. Even then, screenshots exist.
Remember, you're on the internet. Once you post it, it's probably not going away. This is true everywhere.
Finally up and running with an Akkoma instance now. Will play around with this for a week or two but chances are this will become my primary account in the end.
If you haven't been following along I've been frustrated with Mastodon consuming too much server capacity, and have wanted to try something more suited for a single-user instance.
My research led me here, and by truly pushing the boundaries of my server skills I managed to set up my own #Akkoma instance.
It's not pretty (not much Fediverse software seems to be), but it gives me a lot more control in a much more streamlined install. I will likely design my own theme for it as well.
Ya the default Pleroma-FE interface doesn't look great, it's definitely one of those things that is "function over form" type deals. Luckily, the design of #Pleroma (and by extension #Akkoma as it is a fork of Pleroma) is that it is modular enough that changing frontend interfaces is relatively simple.
If you're up for an adventure, take a look at #Mangane, which is a front-end designed to look more modern and frankly, more like Twitter. It's a fork of Soapbox which is included in Akkoma but Mangane is aiming to add Akkoma specific features that are missing in Soapbox. Their dev team seems to be quite responsive to feature requests as well.
Only thing is that the Akkoma dev team doesn't support this fork so if you run into issues, they would want you to change your FE back before they'll support you.
Also, if you want something even more lightweight for single user instances, check out #GoToSocial and #Takahe as well. They're currently in active development (not feature complete) but they're designed to be very lightweight even compared to Pleroma (which is lightweight compared to #Misskey and esp. #Mastodon). Like Pleroma, they also support the Mastodon Client #API.