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YSK: Lemmy has 53k monthly active users but only 1172 have ever donated
(sh.itjust.works)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Ads they won't (At least I believe so.) But I won't be surprised that some data harvesting companies have servers set up to collect all the data, aggregate, and sell it. Lemmy is an openly federated platform after all.
Sell it? For what, 0 dollars? If anyone wants the data, they can just set up an instance themselves.
The data is freely available. Just like open source stuff.
The vaule of the data totally relies on the aggregation process. It involves grouping, categorizing, and linking the unstructured data into a relatable and structured format. For example, A data harvesting company can use their own existing data and link a Lemmy user to a known identity or the probability to a known identity, using techniques like NLP and statistics. That's value.
Data most of the time are free, but there are also datasets sold for a price.