@bluestarultor so my comment was mainly about the somewhat ad hominem claim that one shouldn’t use a tool made by a Meta employee and that therefore it had to be data harvesting.

You’re raising the broader question of whether Followgraph is in general a bad thing. Hmm, so if I’m reading you correctly, there are a few distinct pieces here:

1. “Public aggregation of public data is creepy.” I’m sympathetic to this. I wrestled with this when I added the feature to my Mastodon client to let you jump to someone’s oldest toots and scroll “newer” from there, there was a real worry that making it easy to do this would widen the abuse surface area. But I feel that that’s why Fedi apps including Mastodon give you tools like (1) follow requests, (2) auto-delete toots, (3) hide follower graph, (4) opt out of search engines, etc., to control how much is public, I made the decision (perhaps wrong) that tooling to more easily slice and dice public data was acceptable, and why I’m fine with Followgraph.
2. “We’ve always done it this way, part 1: scraping is bad.” I’m not going to go here since it has nothing to do with Followgraph and because the issue with Archive.org being asked to crawl that instance shutting down was… horrific in many compounding ways.
3. “We’ve always done it this way, part 2: organic discovery is good, anything else is bad.” I have little sympathy for this. Which is weird because, I personally like organic discovery, and likely the reason I’ve stayed on Octodon is because others there like organic discovery too, but I don’t think I ever thought that was normative. I don’t think it was some spiritual thing holding back the creation of Followgraph until now (“back in my day…!”), it’s just with a lot more users there’s a lot more divergent workflows and use cases, and talent to make new tooling.

But that’s just my personal view. I don’t think you or Kye are silly for having your views and avoiding Followgraph—diversity is strength. I personally found Followgraph’s analysis of my graph predictable, like, “yup I don’t follow that account for a reason”. But I’m not a normal social media user either (cf., above-mentioned Mastodon client/my pinned toot).
@Kye @carnage4life

@22 @Kye @carnage4life @bluestarultor Am I understading your argument correctly? You are OK that the information is out there, but you have a problem if someone looks?

It's completely OK to resist the creation of these tools from the point of view of organic growth instead of recommendations made by a tool. But making this a privacy issue is a bit misleading. Mastodon has controls to prevent sharing of your social graph, I think what you are trying to argue for is that the default should be not to share your graph. If that indeed is the case, I recommend you file an issue with mastodon and collect your arguments there.