I recall hearing that you're supposed to block followbots for some reason.
Can someone remind me why that is?
@sajan I'm not even clear what they do. Bots on other platforms are never so consistently named. What is the purpose of a "followbot?"
@linkskywalker the more I look at the word 'followbot' the creepier it gets
@linkskywalker @sajan I haven’t heard of the term followbot, but there’s bots that follow every user they can to track growth of instances and the Mastodon universe at large. Because the platform is federated, I believe it’s the only way to track the number of users...
@linkskywalker Huh, I do that on instagram (because it's not decentralised (? Am I using that right?!) and fuck those kinds of follows. I guess I didn't bat an eyelid at them on here, but i'd also be curious to know about reasons to block them (like potentially being data collectors)