Found this post super informative as it relates to Mastodon, and thought Lemmy might also benefit from this perspective. I'm not sure I share his optimism, but his points seem sound to dampen some of the alarm bells over Meta joining the Fediverse.

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[–] abhibeckert 23 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Isn't all of that already available to Meta (and anyone else) via the web UI anyway? They don't need to be federated for that, they can just use a web crawler. And I assume they are.

Frankly, there are other instances out there that I'm more worried about than Threads.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Why use a crawler if you could spin up some camoflaged small instances and get the info right via the regular api?
Or create accounts and get the info from the client api like apps?

[–] abhibeckert 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

... running a crawler would be far easier than running the largest instance in the fediverse ...

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'm not sure about Mastodon, but at least for Lemmy, not every piece of information is available from the API or web interface. Some of it is only sent through federation. Namely, who, specifically, voted for something, edit history, probably a few other things.

Does Mastodon just hand over a complete list of everyone who liked a post? Even if it has thousands of likes? That kind of data would be very valuable to a company like Facebook.