Why can’t Meta (or any other shady company/ organization) do that now anyway. Just set up an innocent looking server, populate it with a small number of accounts to make it look legitimate, federate and start sucking in data. Do you really think every single federated server is run by people with hearts of gold and pure intentions? Your shit is already getting harvested, there’s no stopping that. They don’t need Threads if all they want is to index posts.
Meta sucks, I get it, but I think a lot of the fear Threads is generating is way overblown.
I’ve been on the fediverse since 2017. Anyone who’s dealt with running an instance knows how much of a pain in the ass dealing with huge monolithic instances is.
Recently on Mastodon for example, Mastodon.social has had huge spam waves of bots creating accounts on it then randomly sending replies with spam links to anyone they can find. And of course because Mastodon.Social is a huge instance with not enough moderators, people on outside instances can’t really do anything except whack-a-mole with the constantly new accounts since the “flagship instance” has open registration. At one point the instance I use now had to suspend mastodon.social temporarily to make the spam wave stop, which of course screwed up everyone’s follows.
The best part of Mastodon is the federated nature of the network, which gets completely screwed up when you have mountains of people on a handful of “too-big-to-suspend” instances rather than have people spread out across hundreds-thousands of smaller spaces.
