3·
2 years agoI feel like AI being the reason doesn’t hold up particularly well from a technical standpoint. From my searching, web-scraping is completely legal. It’d be slower, but a massive dataset is still very collectable.
Plus building a web-scraper is so easy now. Funny enough, generative AI like chat gpt can get you like 95% of the way there in just a few minutes.
Though, none of the reasons they’ve stated so far seem to hold up to scrutiny.
I’ll edit this comment when I get to my computer to link to a great article about this and a history of companies effectively killing federated services .
Edit: article here https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
But the main issue isn’t the data. It’s that when 99% of the users are coming through a company, they have too much power when it comes to updates. Meta can effectively control how the fediverse grows. And if they decided to defederate it’s the normal Lemmy and kbin users who are forced to use meta services to keep in contact with the same people