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 sloppily slam a little ActivityPub into their new attack on Twitter, use the fediverse’s anti-giant-corp-shenanigans-image for advertising ("Have you heard of the super open and user-run and “good” and super data protective fediverse thing? You can have that through us and it will still feel like the big-corp-world you are used to but shomehow make you feel all anti-capitalism and warm inside! DOWNLOAD TODAY!), boost the availability of content from launch and then, as the cherry on top, eliminate the need for any real ressources that would be required to scrape the web and avoid any legal issues that come with that. ActivityPub will make the rest of the fediverse bring all that content to them free of charge. NO APIs, nothing to call, nothing to monitor. The ActivityPub component on their end just needs to be running and all that nice, juicy user data from people who did not want them to have their data will come rushing in just like that.
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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.