The myth goes deeper.
The story of Lisa Holst originating this myth as a spoof fact is also a myth.

Neither the supposed journalists, Lisa Holst, nor the magazine, PC Professional, exist.

The hunt is on for the earliest reference. Probably on a newsnet group.

https://www.snopes.com/lisa-birgit-holst/

I used to do it a lot.
Typically this would be responding to someone being provocative.
I decided that they were angry people just trying to make other people angry.
So now I write articles mocking them.
I am much more relaxed now.

What scraping can get is very little public information.

There’s a lot of information that servers keep contained such as IP addresses of where you are when you made a post. Other info such as your email address remains contained within your own instance. Meta cannot get at that information. No other Fediverse server can get at that.

This blog from Gargoron (Eugen Rochko) who essentially created ActivityPub that underpin all these Fediverse systems including Mastodon, Calckey, Pixelfed, kbin, Lemmy etc.

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/

Absolutely agree.

No-one ever took the lettuce’s feelings into consideration.

Oliphant maintains a minimum block list that most systems take as a starter list.

Each instance admin decides which servers to block for themselves. If you visit the info pages of some systems they will list blocked systems, and there are a lot of them.

There are some very unsavoury communities out there. Blocking usually revolves around how effective moderation is.

As an example you can see a list of servers blocked by mastodonapp.uk on the About page.

https://mastodonapp.uk/about

I am a donor on various instances.
I’d take a dim view of being eaten.

I’m guessing you haven’t been on the #Fediverse very long so not picked up on the ethos of most of the folk who run the various instances.
Most are very protective of what they have created as a community and are definitely not in it for the money. Some are vehemently anti-capitalist.

There are many ways to get rich. Running an instance is not one of them.