this post was submitted on 21 May 2025
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I see a lot of drama here in the thread, people decrying data leaks, how Discord is very very bad, and a number of people wanting the "good old days" of forums.
Yes. I like forums too, but, uh...
These researchers scraped publicly posted messages. Keyword here being "public". How would anything similarly public, like a forum, be better?
I actually remember the times when forums were at their peak. I hung out on BZPower for Bionicle things, and the Relic News Forum for Homeworld modding. You know what they had? Google bots that scraped messages, looked for certain words, and populated websites with advertisements based on what it could scrape from forums.
Pretty sure Lemmy doesn't do encryption either, unless there's some very special, private Lemmy server that nobody has access to. So the researchers could've just as well scraped the fediverse.
People in general have no idea and just want to get spun up on drama and manufactured outrage.
Same thing happened when people started scrapping Twitter 10-15 years ago.