What even is your point? Does one protester’s desire for violence justify the Chinese government’s violence?

Voyager (formally Wefwef) is doing this. You can favorite communities and it will push them to the top. It’s been useful for monitoring smaller communities.

What I do not understand about this take is that they can already collect all of this data, today. They don’t need to federate with the rest of the Fediverse to scrape basically all of the data they want. The only problematic thing they’d need an instance for is linking votes to users - which is something they could do just by spinning up a Lemmy instance. And they probably shouldn’t be able to, Lemmy should try to figure out a way to anonymize votes.

Threads joining the Fediverse does not significantly increase their ability to collect data about existing Fediverse denizens.

They already can access all if your data in the fediverse. They don’t need their own platform to do that.