Yup, and that’s a large part of why I don’t use larger SM. Yeah, Meta, Twitter/X, Microsoft, Google, etc can scrape lemmy, but that’s unlikely to be a huge source of info. But if they scrape, they scrape, and I guess I’m okay with that.
My larger concern is with privacy. I try to mitigate the privacy concerns by recreating my SM accounts every year or two, so that way at least I won’t likely be doxxed.
So on the side, I’m looking into ways of building more robust SM. I’m interested in fully decentralized systems, which can optionally be encrypted and limited to a few. ActivityPub gets close, but it still relies on public servers to store content, and many services aren’t encrypted. I’m more interested in p2p systems like IPFS, and I think a reasonably intuitive system can be built in that way. In fact, I’m planning on building a lemmy-compatible instance that uses Iroh as the backend storage and connection mechanism once Iroh gets to a usable state.
But I’m not exactly a zealot here. I didn’t switch to lemmy until Reddit announced its third party API pricing change (I switched before my app of choice shut down), because I value convenience. Lemmy is now big enough for me, so I’m looking into the next step.