reddit and twitter (suposedly) jacked up their API prices because of data scrapers, what could lemmy to do try to stop them?
i dont think we can do anything
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Well, they did it because they’re for profit companies looking to wring money out of people’s interactions. Lemmy is open source and, by nature, publicly and readily available to whatever observers want to federate. It would be dead simple to create an activitypub server that does nothing but listen and save a copy of everything everyone ever said or posted (at least, those you get it to federate with).
Why would we? I posted on the internet with the knowledge that it would be used by others
Yeah, I actually think lemmy could benefit from improved scraping and indexing. For example, it’d really help if more search engines could natively understand Lemmy’s federated nature, e.g:
- Deduplicate links by prioritising results for instances hosting the community that a post was originally submitted to.
- Include and denote cross posts by recognizing order of submission timestamp and prioritizing popularity via vote ratios, comment counts, and lurker click-through traffic.
- Do the same deduplication and prioritization across instances, but for comments as well.
Another use case besides search engines would be for internet archive projects, helping to preserve historic internet content even in the face of lemmy instances falling offline and disappearing. For example, much knowledge was lost to us due to the Twitter APIoplicips and Reddit Blackout: E.g:
Most of the above will only ever be possible due to improved scraping or even federation APIs.
