I have already written more comments here than I ever did on reddit. I want lemmy to succeed and it needs even us lurkers to do that. It ain’t much–but I am commenting ;)

I am a software dev. Me and everyone in my team are still fully remote. The team-lead has been backing this. Most team members would have very long commutes >1h per direction. There has been some pressure from middle management to spend time at the office. Not all teams are able to work fully remote and there is a sense those teams might envy the remote teams. But so far the software teams have been able to stay remote.

My partner is also fully remote (also a tech related job) and will remain so. Among friends and acquaintances a lot of people have returned to some office time even the other devs.

I do not think I will ever be full-time at an office again. I could imagine a job where if it wasn‘t more than 30 minutes (by bike or public transport) away I might go into the office once a week. More than that: please no.

I do have a very nice office at home. Not everyone does.

It‘s not just about the data—which is bad enough but as you said they could just write a crawler to get at it. The question is why would they want to federate and why now? Meta being Meta the most likely reasons are terrible for the fediverse and it reminds me very much of Google and xmpp. I saw a really good writeup on this yesterday: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html