@stpaultim @darius I'm not sure it did. Just this week, I had to defederate an instance because their followbot decided to follow me and draw in my content for some nebulous "new social network", and the bot's homepage was a "whitepaper" that decried how ActivityPub doesn't allow for silent follows without notification. Indeed, said developer asked for the standard to be changed to allow for following someone without their knowledge.

This hardly seems like a chilling effect.