I didn’t say you targeted Alice specifically (the opposite, in fact), but they are a specific example of the problem. But hundreds of thousands of accounts makes it worse, not better. That means you’re doing the same problematic thing to every other hashtag that has a small number of contributors and/or is primarily associated with one particular person.
And setting aside the attention-harvesting aspect of this, I also think this is a boil-the-ocean solution to something that could barely be called a problem. Who was clamoring for this? Who had “hashtag apartheid” anywhere on their lists of reasons the Fediverse didn’t work? To the extent this is even an issue, small servers that can’t see hashtags well is solved by better federation. Other services that can’t follow hashtags are *different services* and are allowed to offer different feature sets. Your service might “solve” those problems, but I think the costs and externalities are too high.
I will say, my previous posts may have implied you are doing this in order to harvest follows and attention that would otherwise go directly to the original posters; having read several of your replies this morning, I believe that’s not your intent. To whatever extent your service has uptake, though, that *will* be an effect of it. That’s why I find it problematic.
