That seems like a plus to them.

I’ve just asked. There is a FOSS but not federated version.

But it is largely human-curated and indexed. That’s great for training AI, like Reddit.

We just added it as the old frontend was getting hammered by bots - it helped a lot.

There are lists of bots that instance Admins can block for a range of reasons.

Anything online can be scraped but big firms might run into regulatory trouble if they are caught randomly scraping sites without consent. At the moment, the big social media apps have a tonne of content to train on in tightly controlled conditions, so they don’t really need to go into the wild, yet. However, we need to be vigilant, block them and make a fuss if we catch them at it.

That’s the bit that made me laugh: “nothing to see here, we’ve been doing this for a while. What, you didn’t know? Not our fault you are unobservant.”