@briankrebs Good point. I've been in the fediverse for years and never thought about this specifically.

It seemed obvious since what is Mastodon or any of the others going to do with contacts? Mastodon isn't selling anything, isn't trying to build up a user base to make money off of. In fact, in the early days membership was by invitation only. "Walk in" users were not welcome. Nobody was trying to increase the user base. We wanted to keep it small, to a limited number of select people. Asking for someone's contact list doesn't even make sense in that context.