So this has been going around my head for a while now: What if they do not care about their users per se but want the few users they get to exploit the federation to shamelessly crawl the fediverse?
I mean… they get enough users that will subscribe to enough of the fediverse to make instances of every shape and size proactively deliver them our post and interaction data with free shipping, right?
So is defederating in the end not only a prevention against company controlled content that might flood the fediverse, but a measure to protect the users on the fediverse right now from ending up in Meta’s databases just in the same way they would if they just had used facebook in the first place?
or they can just set up single user instance, populate it with bots that subscribe everywhere, and get the same effect
Yes and no. Coding a bot that actually runs reliably when dealing with mass-inputs to other servers isn’t as easy as having users do the stuff for free. Time isn’t important to them I guess. Plus: As an added bonus you get the “embrace, divide and conquer” approach that has worked for services like XMPP for example.