100% certainty. the data gleemed from the content produced by a lively community is valuable to data mining and marketing. once an instance makes their radar, they will want a pipe into it. whether they pay the instance owner, the ISP/cloud it sits on, or just copy the data maliciously, they'll get it and sell it. and then have a plan to manipulate it / sell to that user pool as well.
it's "natural" (for assholes) to do this. seems to happen everywhere, but lemmy and fediverse are prone to it for now.
thanks mate, didn't think to actually Google it (I thought it was gonna be some made up rizz rizz fr fr skibiti toilet shit)