•  dan   ( @dan@lemm.ee ) 
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      1 year ago

      The problem with scraping is that while it’s difficult/impossible to block completely, it’s pretty easy to keep making changes to your site to disrupt scrapers. The work required by the scraper to adapt to those changes is usually way more than the work you put in to disrupt them.

      So if a commercial site wants to make scraping unreliable and impractical, they almost certainly can.

    • Honestly curious if they’d ever consider that, considering how popular watching youtube on the phone is, so I could see them trying to get even desktop users to use an app to prevent 3rd party launchers

      If they did though, it would probably cause at least a decent number of people to try to find alternatives

      At the end of the day, the main way the fediverse gets new users is the big tech companies screwing up