which IMO is a bit silly - Meta can and probably is scraping all the available public information anyway, defederating doesn’t really fix that
If they’re federated everything gets sent to them automatically.
If they’re not, they only get the info users see, and it’s a hassle to compile index and store. Like they could keep a running index of every user page, but why would they?
The only information that actually gets federated to other servers is public information that is globally visible anyway. Fediverse servers don’t (or at least SHOULDN’T) trust each other.
It’s not actually that hard to index and store the information, especially if you just want textual post data - Mastodon at least can serve you an easy to parse version of a user’s posts if you request it. Sure you need to poll for the information rather than it just being sent to you, but I think if they were motivated enough they could do it.
If they’re federated everything gets sent to them automatically.
If they’re not, they only get the info users see, and it’s a hassle to compile index and store. Like they could keep a running index of every user page, but why would they?
The only information that actually gets federated to other servers is public information that is globally visible anyway. Fediverse servers don’t (or at least SHOULDN’T) trust each other.
It’s not actually that hard to index and store the information, especially if you just want textual post data - Mastodon at least can serve you an easy to parse version of a user’s posts if you request it. Sure you need to poll for the information rather than it just being sent to you, but I think if they were motivated enough they could do it.
Easy to spin up a scrapper server that isn’t threads to collect data.