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   pistolero (p@fsebugoutzone.org)'s status on Saturday, 05-Apr-2025 16:41:36 JST pistolero
   @miscbrains @icedquinn
   
   > shifting the language just muddies the waters, but fuck me it's late...
   
   Well, the point wasn't language. The point was that something has to change about why you are eating and what you are eating for simple eating to become gluttony. The difference is in context and motivation. (The 1913 edition of Webster's says "Excess in eating; extravagant indulgence of the appetite for food; voracity.")
   
   So there's exploitation, right? There's a difference between employing a person and exploiting them. There's a difference between using FSE's public-facing APIs and scraping FSE.
   
   Or, here's something: I have a small script that scrapes followers. This is a trivial thing, because the APIs are designed to be used, and I wrote it because of Pawoo. The CP guys were showing up there, and sometimes you see an account and that account exists only for CP, right? The account is only an hour old, it has 200 followers. I felt pretty comfortable reasoning that it was one of the dumping accounts (people that don't want to endanger their home server will hop servers, dump a bunch of shit until they get banned there; in the mean time, a bunch of accounts from youjo.love and freak.university and whatever are following that guy) and that anyone following it was someone I should ice right away. So when I saw someone like that, I'd scrape the followers and kill off those accounts. Was this morally wrong? I wanted to get the account's followers before Pawoo killed off the account, so I didn't even put a delay in; I usually put a delay into scripts like that. (And then those people would disappear from FSE, Poast, anyone else that asked for the list.) I don't have any moral issues with doing it like that: it dried the fuckers out, FSE stopped seeing them. I'm against scraping fedi, but that was a case where another concern (getting the pedos away from FSE) overrode the other one.
   
   The reason scraping is bad to do to fedi is because of the effects: it breaks fedi servers, it degrades legitimate use, it provides information to people that want to censor or exploit or destroy fedi, and allowing it incentivizes all sorts of scummy behavior. (The parallels with spam should be obvious.) If it's axiomatic that scraping is somehow an evil activity, we'll have to agree to disagree; I'm fine with people thinking I'm evil.
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