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mastodon.ar.al is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
This is my personal fediverse server.

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Mark Shane Hayden

PSA to all admins: I highly recommend a #FediBlock of #mastinator (ie. the entire mastinator.com domain).

Mastinator is a service that allows a person to anonymously follow people on the fediverse. No big deal you think? Your public posts are probably already anonymously viewable from your public profile anyways and all it is doing is aggregating public info? That is what its creator claims---it is just a convenience service!

Well no, it is mode concerning than that. It does this aggregation by following any account a mastinator user types into its service then replicating *all* your non-DM posts into a sort of "proxy inbox" in the mastinator.com domain that is completely out of your control and viewable by everyone!

In other words, if you are followed by mastinator.com it effectively turns your follower-only posts into public posts and lets people you have blocked keep following you by following the mastinator replica of your posts!

Innocent intentions or not this violates user consent.

Public
Hanneke

@msh I'm not really well versed in ActivityPub etc, but I assume mastinator does not follow the actual account but rather scrapes the public feed (through an api or not).

So I have a few questions:

1) what would a block accomplish? That wouldn't block a scraper from accessing public data?

2) Blocking scrapers is hard and easily circumvented, but are there ip lists?

3) Shouldn't follower-only post not appear in public feeds? Is it a courtesy feature of the client to not show these?

Public
Hanneke

@aral @msh Ok so if you don’t accept the follow (or block it), it will stop aggregating? Well at least that’s something…

Of course it’s still shit and it will undoubtedly keep content that a user deletes.

Public
Aral Balkan

@h5e Yep. Apparently it’s ephemeral, though, and the database exists only in RAM (so it’s wiped when the server is restarted). But yes, still… I don’t want random bots (with my name on them, much less) following me and aggregating my posts without my permission :)

@msh

Public
american
@aral @h5e @msh fedi is a full mesh http based gossip network, this concept of "post privacy" is asinine.
Quiet public
opal hart
@aral @h5e @msh manually approving followers can prevent this then. this is why i dont like follower-only posts compared to something more fine-grained like circles, because its all-or-nothing right now
Quiet public
Mark Shane Hayden

@opal requiring follow requests to be manually approved can help yes, but since auto approval is the default in masto most people don't do that hence the warning.

Circles/channels would be handy yeah. I think some devs are looking at implementing them (or already have) in masto forks and other federated apps at least but regular mastodon doesn't.

@aral @h5e

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