You know I didn’t think of this. Does every new instance created, if it chooses to, federate and download data automatically from the other instances? Like upvotes downvotes etc, or is that only possible when something like kbin or lemmy.ml agree to federate with instance x?
So I can create an instance and automatically start scraping people’s info? Or is an instance not even necessary? I understand how web crawlers and spiders will index but do they have access to the granular account data? If so how do we mitigate this?