this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2024
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That's true as well that I hadn't thought of, one could just spin up a VPS in a country that doesn't give a shit about licensing agreements and use a bot to scrape the data, or even just spin a instance up and Federate/subscribe with everyone that is an open instance / doesn't use the whitelist (i.e most of the instances) and scrape that way. The only real defense against the latter is defederation, but that system isn't very advanced and is easily bypassable if you don't have a bunch of users
Personally I would be absolutely shocked if this wasn't already happening, downside of a free/decentralized protocol I guess
Better yet, just spin up your own instance, subscribe to all major communities, and have the servers push the comments to yours. No scraping required, and nobody will ever find out it was you.
Statistically it's likely to have happened already.