Hi fellow Mastodon admins,
we received a somewhat dodgy e-mail from "Mastodon Survey Admin" <postmaster@oldnewstreet.com> with the subject: "Mastodon State of the Fediverse (July 2022) Survey" today. Our reply was bounced by mailgun.org because "Recipient rejected", so we are posting it here:
```
Hi Ashley,
we are not going to take part in your survey because …
– you do not mention who commissioned this survey
– you do not mention who you work for
– you do not clarify which group you refer to in "on our behalf"
– you use a survey service that includes Google trackers in violation
of the GDPR (applicable law of the European Union).
Greetings from Bielefeld, Germany!
the admins of digitalcourage.social
```
The link included in Ashley's e-mail lead to surveyplanet·com.
@freiheit Same.
My answer was «thank you for your invitation, but I'd expect a survey on #Mastodon to be run with free software, such as #LimeSurvey. Also, what license will the results be published under?»
@shlee @freiheit Ok. I recommend that whatever data you publish should be CC-0, and any text or other original work CC-BY or CC-BY-SA.
Libre #OpenAccess and #OpenData, to give back to the community and the participants. You can use https://zenodo.org or https://arxiv.org for publication/archival.
Are you the person who wrote that e-mail? Care to clarify anything? /c
@freiheit anything in particular? I can answer the questions in the original post in a short while if you wish.
@shlee Yes, answers to our questions in the original post would be great. /c
you do not mention who commissioned this survey: No entity or group commissioned this, I'm just a guy.
– you do not mention who you work for: I have a day job as a security engineer, but I didn't consider it important.
– you do not clarify which group you refer to in "on our behalf": The target audience of other likeminded instance administrators (anybody who filled in my survey).
– you use a survey service that includes Google trackers in violation
of the GDPR (applicable law of the European Union): I did select the EU/GDPR option on the mailgun mailinglist setup.
Bit more information, This survey was the first of it's kind for me, I feel like I got it 90% of the way there, and I do applogise for the lack of transparency that might have made some people more at ease.
I sent the survey out to a small sample size of administrators selected at random, and I mentioned in a toot that day that I was impressed to see responses like yours that raised concerns about phishing and risk.
FYI: I expected 20 responses, and have about 70 right now. So I'm thankful to those instance admins who replied and took it seriously.
I am just a guy, but the response proves that maybe an official survey should be completed done by a professional and not a keen amateur.
@freiheit I've also just got the same vague E-mail, replied to get more info, and my message was bounced back.
#mastoAdmin