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 meta is threatened by the fediverse yet. They’re just trying to grab twitters market share.
Oh, I don’t think they’re threatened by the fediverse either. I think that there is no chance in hell that they have not built some tool internally that will try to funnel every bit of data on the fediverse into their data pools, using users as a means to get the instances they want to scrape to deliver the data to them without any consent of the other instance’s users whatsoever.
Then why they will implement ActivityPub?
Why reinvent the wheel when you have a FLOSS service that has active developers and millions of “beta testers”?