[Tassels]

They're treating their mastodon audience as if it's a twitter audience and failing to read the room.

There's a lot more anti-cop folks on mastodon, so coming out right away with "We hired a policeman & it's going great" is probably not the best icebreaker. It's already gonna set folks on edge.

Then the quote is about hiding covert video and audio surveillance, which is also something that's not gonna be well received by the audience on mastodon.

They then doubled down in their responses to folks concerned with the toot. They started making edgy responses which simply shouldn't be how brands engage folks on mastodon. It's a different audience than twitter. Telling well-respected folks to unfollow and "chill" is unnecessarily combative, especially by saying condescending stuff like "bye bye now" and calling followers childish.

If they would have framed it as hiring a former security officer and then detailing what he's doing with the Pi, they would have been fine. But they framed it in just about the worst way possible, then doubled down with troll-y replies.