The title is unclear because the author confuses Mastodon as a software with Mastodon servers. The majority of economists are on a Mastodon server called econtwitter.net.

One of the coauthors also operates a Mastodon instance with over 5000 economists signed up. His complete access to these people’s credentials, such as IP address, email, and names, makes it easy for him to cross reference these people in the webboard. People are questioning if he intentionally set up the server to harvest people’s credentials for doxxing.