If anyone is wondering what happened with that David Rand fellow at MIT who was badly/incompetently scraping fedi, he's tied up with a US NSF-fronted attempt at automating online censorship. A pretty sinister project of the US executive, that's apparently beyond the pale for at least some of Congress. https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/new-report-details-how-national-science-foundation-funding-ai-tools-censor-and
It was p at shitposter dot club who pointed this out in the context of that damn scraper. That instance is, uhm, difficult so you may have missed the original message. It's worth reading though!
https://shitposter.club/objects/1414fed5-883d-4ff6-81bc-4103e01726d3