I read a toot about it last night when I was very tired. Apparently there is some sort of (anti-)privacy protocol in universeodon’s source code that is getting implemented to Masto main source soon.

I wasn’t able to find the relevant post, but I do remember that it can only be disabled by toggling ‘Discoverable’ under account options. Evidently Eugen said something along the lines of “it’s what people expect from social media” but the point of Mastodon was to be a divergence from traditional social media, no?

There was a community on the old site called 196, where the only “rule” was that you had to post something before leaving. It leaked over here because of a few splinter communities here popping up on the All feed, but if you look closer most of those posts will be to various 196 communities.

In other words, it’s not actually an enforceable rule, just one of those social things that pop up.