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?
I don’t think anyone needs consent to do research using your public posts though. You can literally scrape the whole Twitter and run sentiment analysis and nobody can do anything about it for example.
What does that do for Thread users though? They can’t interact with the posts. Would make Thread suck more as suddenly there is this group of users in some strange parallel universe you can see but can’t interact with and they can’t see you.