Talking about reputation, only people need a reputation.
For example, the "System Monitoring Center" is good software, but the author is not a good person. *
The same thing applies to mastodon. The software we're using is just software. Everyone has their own opinion about decentralized things, and people like or dislike it because of the tech it used. However, for the mastodon company, they need reputation.
But in my opinion, they shall not bind/mix those two things together. The mastodon we use is an open-sourced software licensed under AGPLv3, there is nothing to do with the mastodon company. I would just call it a name scam.
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*Note: It's hard to judge whether something is good or bad, so the good and bad I used there is a naive indication of general good and bad. By "not a good person", I mean a person is controversial, and whose opinions are not widely accepted by others.
