Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)…
What you see via the UI isn’t “all that exists”. Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see “under the hood”. Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won’t normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.
Edit: To clarify, not just YOUR instance admin gets this info. This is ANY instance admin across the Fediverse.
Hosting (or simply just using) a crawler takes less resources and skill than hosting Lemmy let alone modify it the way you intend.
Yes, I know, every CS student can program a crawler. I explained in another comment why it’s still a huge difference.
Maybe if hosting a Lemmy instance is that hard, it’s enough? I don’t know.
I found hosting a Lemmy instance pretty easy but I admit I have the experience to readily recognize how fucked the Lemmy docker-compose example is.
No clue whatsoever how to write a crawler.
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