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.
rimu
joined 2 years ago
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.
Mods, here are the goodies that await you as a moderator of a PieFed community - https://peertube.wtf/w/ce995f49-5209-4f39-9d0f-8db36eebbaf6
It's not smuggled, during initial setup when installing the blocklist it prints this on the screen:
Added 'No-QAnon' blocklist, see https://github.com/rimu/no-qanon