The point of a hashtag is to organize and label things.

If we are writing our musings on 20th century aviation with a tag nobody used. Because we just want to go back to our musings and keep everything handy so people can mute it. We do not want a bunch of machines ingesting all our thoughts and broadcasting them to the world.

The fact those accounts have the name of the hashtag makes it half a step removed from impersonation. People using their aliases as a tag for art for example now see their name plastered everywhere ***as an account***

This is a violation of privacy and that man can take his bots and go to hell with them.

Doing it for all tags is arguably the least Algorithm way. Treat everything equally. But people use tags in ways he didn’t expect or understand, thence harm.

Edit: more context: https://bayes.club/@wronglang/116853627591651418

Great look for someone giving a workshop aye ?

https://social.coop/@dweb/116852145399504187

I was not aware of Evan's involvement with them. That is worrisome. I suppose I just assumed anyone working on the Fediverse was going to be a conscientious person... (And I do realise how that is always a poor assumption in any scenario.)

Thank you for fighting this. I'll be keeping an eye out to see if there is anything I can do to support the fight.

This is also nonsense from a technical perspective: It's working around a perceived limitation of how federation is implemented. Why are you doing that instead of working on a proposal to fix that limitation?

I left him instructions but IDNK whether the very notion of "in" direction in "opt-in" clicks there, as seen in:

https://github.com/social-web-foundation/tags.pub/issues/37#issuecomment-4867669076

@AltAfterDark @alice_watson@infosec.exchange @alice@masto.thefword.club @alice_watson@mastodon.social

The way tags work is deeply non-obvious to new users. These are exactly the people who initially rely on tools like tags to help them find new people to follow.

Creating an account for a tag and having that account boost posts with the tag is a naïve workaround, but clearly not a good one. Should have been discussed more broadly to learn of objections first.

The goal of every "tech visionary" since then has been to find a new unmonitored conversational niche to capitalize on.

Google currently does this with conversations recorded from people in the same general area as a phone (a public conversation, but not one the participants would reasonably expect to be shared with ten thousand advertising companies). But hey, it's cool, it lets Google serve ads for baby clothes/accessories to people who don't even know they're pregnant yet. Progress! Super creepy, but they've coerced consent by being the biggest game in town, so it's okay (legally).

Meanwhile, bottom feeders like Evan are both incapable of respecting consent -and- incapable of coming up with an original idea. He's a tech visionary though! Big time, 4real!!

What a sad little person.

My comment about block evasion was mostly for @toothpaste_sandwich and anyone else reading this who might not have read the full threads

Evan mentioned a bug with tags with mixed case, I assume it was something to do with case-sensitive comparison

And I agree you shouldn't have had to ask, or ask a second time

@toothpaste_sandwich

"I most vividly remember his little poll trying to show that the fediverse was too hostile towards AI."

Assuming here we're still talking about Evan

I've had quite a bit of direct contact with his; he's had me blocked on at least two instances I've known him to be on

Over the years I've simply come to think of Evan as #MrMaxiFedi

Other than being very, very full of himself, he's simply never heard of an idea that might expand the reach of the Fediverse that he didn't like and didn't subscribe to 110%

Mr Maxi-Fedi

That's our Evan...

cc @ireneista @alice

I would like to make a correction here regarding the the technical mechanism used; I want to make it clear that I'm not doing so to minimize how creepy it is or how it violated consent, which are things he needs to answer for.

The boosts that tags.pub uses are block-preserving: that is, they let the server that receives them know that the post exists, but do not contain the contents of that post - no text or images. The receiving server must contact the original server the post came from to get those, and the origin server will apply its own policies. These boosts *do* let more fediverse servers know about posts, but they don't circumvent blocks, eg. if the origin server has defederated from the recipient, or if the poster has blocked that server, etc., they won't be able to get the contents.

¹ Being a sexworker and ex-tech executive, who uses specific hashtags containing my name, with a large reach and a lot of community goodwill on Fedi—who also had their name and nudes broadcast by this bot service.