@NonPlayableClown

> What is the point to any of this. To keep in tabs with shitposters on fedi?

Several attempts so far to scrape FSE for academia, we have had a lot of DDoS attempts (but it has been a long time, they're pretty rare nowadays). There's some guy that has been shoving the same set of keywords at us for years, despite them having returned zero results most of the time and returning 4xx responses for at least a year.

> Like if they really wanted someone they can (and already have) talk to the isp, the server provider, and get the owner's information and assests.

Depends on who "they" is: shitposting aside, maybe "they" isn't a government.

If we're talking, say, someone that wants to write some crazy shit in the newspaper about online extremism, this is exactly what they might do. If they're some company contracted to find some people that have posted (lemme check https://freespeechextremist.com/media/7f232f3e-00c0-4e07-8ed1-52c518906b07/keywords.tsv?name=keywords.tsv again...) "This [airport] is [awful]. I [can't stand] how [bad] it is. It may be [crappy] and but least it was [cheap]." so they can do hard-hitting journalism about the dangerous rise of internet extremists, then this is exactly what they might do. Maybe "they" is a government and they have hammered a large portion of fedi through various proxies looking for whose stuff to seize. Or it's supposed to look like it's coming from Israel.