On Mastodon, Followers-only posts are only visible to your followers – and to admins of any instances your followers on. But if you haven’t turned on “approve followes”, anybody who’s logged in to an instance you haven’t blocked can follow you and get access to your followers-only posts.
In your view, are followers-only posts public?
The linked post is a Mastodon poll, and I’ll also put in replies here so that you can just upvote the ones you agree with!
couldn’t a malicious instance or fork just ignore who is trying to access the data and show all the toots that have been federated at all? anything that can be retrieved by another instance is public
it’s kinda like when Steam asks for your age when looking at an M rated game