@Concerned_Catgirl I guess they could do that, but they can't then turn around and put a load of microtargeted ads towards you without your instance admin helping them.

@Concerned_Catgirl Well, they can't just make stuff appear in your feed without it being part of a natural interaction. While FB and Twitter have an closed algorithm control exactly what ou see in your feed, with Mastodon (and I assume the other fediverse social networks) the timelines are totally based on the time of each post.

@Concerned_Catgirl I think they' have to be able to map your account from Mastodon onto something else however before they could and I don't think that's possible?

@Concerned_Catgirl Maybe it is possible however? I'm not really an expert in this kind of thing.

@Concerned_Catgirl Then I guess you could maybe target that account?

@Concerned_Catgirl And even if they're all private, all it takes is someone who you think is a person, but is actually a federation bot following you. Or, a malicious instance admin of an instance where someone's following you from.

And, lbr, #nobot won't do shit against an actual malicious bot (it /might/ be construed as an abuse of computer fraud acts for a bot to ignore it, but are you really going to file charges?)