> but I've certainly seen people get upset because they don't understand Mastodon yet This sentence reminded me of another incident. Ben Boyter launched a serv

> but I've certainly seen people get upset because they don't understand Mastodon yet This sentence reminded me of another incident. Ben Boyter launched a service called Mastinator [0], like Mailinator, where you can create disposable fediverse accounts. The fantastic use of this is that you can anonymously follow anyone you want. However, it wasn't taken well by the people. They started sending hateful and abusive messages to Boyter. A popular user tooted [1] something like this, and do check the entire conversation: > A site called Mastinator (https://mastinator.com https://mastinator.com) has started aggregating and republishing toots without permission. It creates accounts with your handle and follows you to get your toots (e.g., @aral@mastinator.com, which, just to make clear, is not me). > @boyter You could, yes. But if you set up an account in my name on your instance, I would call you out for impersonating me and using my name/identity without permission. They were angry that this service let you access their public posts without permission. It is fediverse! It is supposed to be public and federated! He also started getting hate from other people in the fedi, and many fedi instances started blocking the service. He wrote about his experience with fedi and the aftermath, which is an excellent post educating users about how ActivityPub functions. [2] [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34156395 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34156395 [1] - https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/109585159213960986 https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/109585159213960986 [2] - https://boyter.org/posts/mastinator-activitypub-breaking-assumptions/ https://boyter.org/posts/mastinator-activitypub-breaking-ass...