Right. But my point is that they can profit from it. The issue lots of folks seem to be having is "how dare Reddit make money using something I did!", and that issue is even worse for the Fediverse since lots of companies can be doing it.
Or rather, they can't do the work without the risk of Reddit raising a legal fuss that would cost them more than $60 million. The data itself can already be downloaded for free from various places.
Its obscure enough that I don’t think it’s being sought out by AI companies. The nature of federated instances should make it a bit more challenging to pull a complete data set too