They’re not customers, though. They aren’t paying anything and developers owe them nothing in return.

Your mental model of the relationship is entirely misplaced.

We have someone who does it every day. Makes an account, posts lots and lots, then deletes their account.

I added some code to PieFed which automatically deletes posts by new accounts that self-delete. It worked so I had to use my lemmy.world account to reply.

It’s a LLM. Look at their comments, very formulaic.

https://lemmy.world/u/domx?page=1&sort=New&view=Comments

Mods, here are the goodies that await you as a moderator of a PieFed community - https://peertube.wtf/w/ce995f49-5209-4f39-9d0f-8db36eebbaf6

This is fixed now.

I know you know, just posting here so others who stumble in can see it!

e.g. the Reichstag fire where Nazis burned down their own parliament to frame their enemies.

I have bitter memories of Ning. In 2008 a community group I was in clung to their Ning site despite me building them a far superior option. The community split between the two. In 2010 when they removed the free tier my warnings about enshitification and reliance of corporate platforms was finally vindicated but we’d already lost momentum by then.