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/

Sounds good to me.

We all make choices about the company we keep.

I choose not to hang out in biker bars because for me a motorbike is a form of transport and really not interesting to talk about. I get really bored.
My brother is a bike enthusiast with the tattoos etc and he can go on about bikes…

The only danger they pose is to themselves and the witless.

Having said that, they can be really boring and monotonous. Their arguments are gormless at best, and don’t have the intelligence to know when their vacuous arguments have been shot between the water line.

Will they learn anything. Nope. They are immune to intelligence (see what I did there?).

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/