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 think people are misunderstanding what defederating gets us. Yes what you stated is all correct. You don’t even need to have a server you can get the vast majority of the data you need from the public API and scraping the pages. It’s more work but totally feasible.
What defederating gets us is that Thread would need to come up with a convoluted way of pulling in all the data and their users wouldn’t be able to interact with other federverse accounts. You could see my Toots but not be able to comment or +1 them. You’d just see them as if you didn’t even have an account.
So what is the benefit of that? Sounds to me like a shittier service than had they not tried to federate at all.