@DJGummikuh my nudes were being boosted by @alicepics@tags.pub 😐
There was also a @bunnyalice@tags.pub, and several other hashtags that were turned into named bots for the sole purpose of boosting my posts.
This was the most "Invasion of the Body-Snatchers" implementation of a "service" I've seen. Though I admit it would have been worse if it had used my profile photo for the bots.
@alice I fully expect there to be no discriminatory logic behind the operation of this approach. From my understanding this bot just takes the hashtag, generates it as an account and causes the posts to propagate. I'd be ABSOLUTELY with you that the bot attempting to actually impersonate you (e.g. by using your pic), therefore suggesting a direct relation between you and it, would clearly cross a line of immorality, but it doesn't, which feels a very deliberate choice to steer free of this topic
@alice also, with your nudes being public, they already would be available without any controls, authorization or access control beyond deletion by you, even outside the fediverse altogether, so from a strictly judical standpoint, the bot does not tread on issues such as privacy or individual consent for access. I believe the actual discussion to be had in this specific case is the exact definition of what 'publicly available' is supposed to mean and entail
@DJGummikuh you're still arguing that I deserved to be violated.
That's a *really* bad look.
@alice no whether or not something is deserved or anybody's fault is not part of my argument. I see now that we have genuinely different understanding of what publicly posting content on mastodon allows other actors to do, and I do not have the authority to decide which position is 'right'. Voicing and explaining my opinion on that matter was the main goal, with the hope that it is of some value to you and others reading this.
I mean this is technically arguable yes, but "from a strictly judicial standpoint" is simply not the right standpoint. Consent and the law aren't a one-to-one mapping.
@unchartedworlds that is correct but the problem is, the law (and to a degree the ToS of Mastodon) is essentially an agreed-upon understanding of what is and isn't tolerable. Everything beyond that very quickly descends into individual opinion, which is absolutely legal to have but becomes difficult to navigate when different opinions differ. Such as whether posting something public while allowing everybody to boost still allows you to then complain that somebody/something does exactly that.
@unchartedworlds I think this also touches on the question what "rights" you retain to the Hashtags you use. Hashtags are predominantly a technical utility that allow you to categorize and tag your posts for specific topics. Using the name of that hashtag to name a bot does in my personal opinion not touch any legal limits, as they are neither copyrighted nor have an exclusive usage. It also (again, my opinion) does not tie the user to any kind of identity, as their usage is not limited.
@unchartedworlds I think at its core this whole thing blew way out of proportion with a lot of the discussion being caused by completely different frames of reference. This also is an issue exclusive to the Fediverse - no centralized SoMe actually has this problem family, as even bluesky has master servers that theoretically allow synchronization of content - and therefore touches issus and motivations nobody ever really faced since the advent of search engines.
"This also is an issue exclusive to the Fediverse - no centralized SoMe actually has this problem family"
If the issue is "material shared in a particular context is transmitted onward into a different context without asking", then I disagree it's exclusive to Fedi - I've seen that area conceptualised and navigated on Twitter as well. Examples:
• People asking "Okay to retweet?" - not because they legally _had_ to ask, but out of sensitivity to whether the OP _wanted_ their post shared further. Often used for posts where a personal anecdote was shared and other people find it especially illuminating.
• Quote-tweets being used to focus attention on a tweet - widely considered an affordance which can be used for good or evil :-)
Or are you thinking of a _different_ issue?
@unchartedworlds no, that's the point, I'm talking about a COMPLETELY different issue. Due to the federated, non-centralized nature of ActivityPub, if I'm on a single-user instance, and I post a message e.g. under the generic hashtag "linux", even if you follow the linux hashtag, you WILL not see my post unless your server and my server are federated. With this bot server, it would be (presumably, still trying to find out) enough that your server knows the bot server to find my original post.
@unchartedworlds so this bot activity serves a purpose that not necessarily has any gain for the bot per se, it just simplifies populating otherwise non-federated instances to each other. This bot is NOT an aggregator bot "follow my bot instead the artist to get a digest of content"
@unchartedworlds I'm uncertain (as I can't seem to find a definitive answer to that yet) if you even have to follow any account on the bot instance at all or if it is sufficient for your instance to have a single user to follow ANY account on the bot instance to allow you to find hashtag content on any OTHER instance the bot instance has crawled
Oh right, yes I see what you mean - the challenge of successfully federating.
Jun 28, 2026, 3:01 PMThere are more nuances than this, though.
First, 'public' does not equal 'okay to publicise' – the ease of access and amount of automatic visibility matters. For instance, I once spent a significant chunk of effort to get my deadname off my Wikipedia page, as it felt really uncomfortable to have it appear on the top 5 search engine results for anyone looking for my current work contact information.
Second, a regular boost is the result of someone actually thinking that the toot is worth boosting and that it is appropriate to do so. What we have here is a bot-like entity that does the boosting automatically, without any meaningful supervision.
'If it's technically possible, someone will do it' is certainly a pretty accurate description of the net. It's not a useful guideline for ethics, though.
@DJGummikuh I feel violated by a tech bro's bot network using my name, sharing my nudes, and invading my community...and no amount of telling me it's okay is going to make it okay.
End of story.