Traditionally, a “reply guy” is someone who replies to a specific person or group of people over and over with excessive corrections/“just asking questions”/other tactics with the intent to harass/waste time/make people angry. It’s a kind of troll that’s typically on Twitter.

The Fediverse is dominated by hackers, who by their nature are incompatible with existing systems such as capitalism.

It’s an absolutely massive instance that’s a net negative for the Fediverse. It completely defeats the purpose of federation. The Mastodon devs used to drive people to smaller instances but decided they wanted to be /the/ instance. They made themselves a default in the app. At around the same time other instances started getting a crap ton of spam from them that ate up a bunch of moderator’s time on smaller instances. The Fediverse only works in regards to moderation because there is less users per admin, but mastodon.social doesn’t have that advantage. A bunch of people defederated from them as a result which was a good thing for the instances that did it. They failed pretty hard at communicating during this time as well.

Having one instance hold a large part of the network is bad for everybody involved. Defederating from monoliths is a healthy thing for networks to do. Building your own web beats any algorithm, can’t do that if you’re already federating with 99% of people.

I noticed that with Mullvad it’s also doing that, I think it might be an anti-spam system?

This is a good thing. We don’t want another mastodon.social situation.