while I'm at asking noob questions: What is it with all those follow/federation bots that keep following me? Is this just technology made visible, or are they scanning me to determine if I'm a spammer?

@JollyOrc They're following you so that their isntance's federation reaches more people. This is mostly regarded as good by the people who understand it.

If nobody on this instance followed you, I would not see your post on the federated timeline.

@eal Need to make my mind up on this yet.

I can see the upside, but I also can see an upside to the federated timeline being populated by people that are deemed interesting because they've been actively marked as such, not because a bot simply grabbed everyone it could find.

@JollyOrc That's kinda the thing with instances; if you don't like the federated timeline of one of them because there's followbots there, you can jump ship.

The downside, though, is that ideally one should know this before they sign up for an account.